Chapter Six
Marley wasn’t exactly the most involved older sister. The advice I got from her was limited to a few random moments, like when I was set on wearing black satin gloves with a navy-blue dress to prom (“over my dead body”), or when Christina and I decided to try alcohol for the first time last year and she snatched the expired vanilla birthday cake vodka out of our hands and replaced it with White Claws. So I’m at a bit of a loss on who to turn to for anything Maple Ride–related, like if it would be weird to download a dating app when there’s a small but real chance of running into my mortal enemy on it, or how long is too long to avoid coming home.
Or, say, what to do when you find your roommate’s entire body flung like a starfish across a row of washing machines in the dorm’s laundry room on a Friday night.
“Um, I’m pretty sure there’s a perfectly good mattress with your name on it upstairs.”
Christina cracks an eye open from her metal perch. Her messy bun is even messier than usual, and the circles under her eyes rival my mom’s after pulling a coding overnighter. She blearily holds up her phone, emblazoned with an aggressive HYDRATE OR DIE-DRATE , to check the time.
“If our fellow students don’t want to do their laundry wondering whether or not a corpse is in their midst, that’s a personal problem,” Christina grouses.
I tilt my head to get a better look at her horizontal self. “Speaking of personal problems… are you good?”
She presses her palms to her eyes to wake herself up. “Peachy. I love going to two practices a day and only ever sleeping on the smelly travel bus. I’m wild about having to somehow maintain a GPA in Gen Ed classes I low-key hate to keep my scholarship. My favorite part was getting a call from the school concerned I haven’t declared a major yet because apparently scholarship students have to decide by midsemester.”
“Oh, shit,” I say candidly. “Well, do you have any contenders?”
“Yeah. I’m majoring in Leave Me Alone with a minor in Is It December Yet?”
Ah, yikes. Between her practices and my series of rewrites and tweaks to my Newsbag submission, I haven’t seen much of Christina these past few days. I didn’t realize she’d gotten into “Feeling Sorry for Myself” Spotify-playlist territory, and from the looks of it, it’s more than justified.
“Are you having fun at cross-country at least?” I ask. This is yet another Brighton family-management strategy: attempting to find the bright side of a situation.
Christina’s level of sleep deprivation may be too far gone for that, though, because her first attempt at an answer is swallowed by a yawn.
“I mean, yeah,” she says at the tail end of it. “But everyone there is always so intense. The whole point of trying to get into the Hindu Student Union was making friends outside of cross-country. With this schedule, I feel like I can’t make any new ones.”
“Ah, bummer,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. “I heard all your old ones are crap.”
She sticks her tongue out at me, then blearily pulls herself up to sit, dangling her legs over one of the washing machines.
“But legit, I haven’t crossed off a single thing on our Bitch List,” she says—a new shorthand for the “Christina and Sadie Make Maple Ride Their Bitch!!” list that has mildly concerned a few of our hallmates, who seem to fear becoming a “bitch” on said list.
I hike myself up on the washing machine next to her, setting down my laptop and my laundry basket on the other side of me. “I’m sure it’ll be fine once you get into the swing of things. We’re like five percent of the way through the semester.”
“And all the way through the parts that count, ” says Christina miserably. “Like, I already missed the interest meeting for the HSU, so nobody told me they moved the council election day, so now I have no idea which person to suck up to if I want to get on the event-planning board, which might be a moot point anyway because what can I even go to? And fat chance of me ever looking hot at a party again. The Disney thing was fun and all but our coach kicked our asses the next day.” She runs a frustrated hand through the top of her hair, blinking the exhaustion out of her eyes. “And the only kissable boys I’ve been within a ten-foot radius of are other athletes in the student gym, and I’ve done multivariable calculus equations less complicated than trying to figure out a way to make our schedules fit.”
Ah. We’ve skipped straight from sad playlist Christina to mandatory nap time Christina. I haven’t seen her since our college app deadlines last fall, so her appearance was probably overdue.
“Well, how about you sleep upstairs, and I babysit this situation,” I say, gesturing at the dryer she set her laundry bag on. “I’m stuck down here for the next hour with my own stuff anyway.”
Christina shakes her head. “It’s gonna be done in a few minutes. Also you promised me you’d let me see your Newsbag piece.”
“And I will. After you sleep for like, ten hours minimum.”
Christina ignores me, reaching over my lap to commandeer my laptop and type the password to open it. (We’re in mutual agreement that we wipe each other’s search histories if either of us dies—Christina for the Game of Thrones fan fiction, me because I don’t want Seb to have the satisfaction of knowing I use a burner Instagram to look at Adams’ Apples, even after I’ve left this mortal plane.)
“‘Choose Your Own Adventure: Drunk Snacks Edition,’” Christina reads out loud. “Oh, shit. A quiz. So I’m a guinea pig.”
“The first ever,” I tell her, which reminds me: if this really is due in two days, I should have a few other people take a crack at it.
“It’s like my dear old friend Jerry is right here in the room with us,” she says fondly. “First question: ‘What kind of drinking did you do tonight? Option A: Seltzer Sweetie; you’ve consumed enough to belt One Direction but not reveal that you once kept a life-sized cutout of Harry Styles in your bedroom. Option B: Beer Buddy; you’re willing to listen to an econ major in the bathroom line talk about game theory but not self-aware enough to stop yourself from making ‘help me’ faces at anyone who passes. Option—’”
I squirm. “You can just—take it and tell me what you get.” For some reason hearing my writing read out loud to me feels like someone holding up one of those upsettingly well-magnified mirrors that let you see all your open pores.
“On it,” says Christina.
I find another way to torture myself by watching her carefully as she scrolls through the quiz, accounting for every twitch of her lip and chuckle under her breath. Finally she leans back and narrates out loud, “‘Congratulations. You’re a Potato Chip S’more, a beautiful, unrepentant hot mess. Like if a disco ball gained sentience, and the first thing it said was “SHOTS?” You deserve the majesty of a post-party snack every bit as dazzling and chaotic as you are.’” She points a finger to the text under it, where there’s a recipe and a credit to the Sad Bitch Book Club. “Oh, that’s cute.”
“Cute?” I ask nervously.
Christina tilts her head to bop it into mine. “Fresh. Funny. And definitely unexpected.”
I try not to look too pleased with myself. “Yeah. They’ve never done anything in this format before, but I figured, go weird or go home,” I say. “I already know Seb’s got me beat on the traditional stuff.”
That assessment has nothing to do with my confidence in my ability to write news—it’s just the truth. When it comes to straight writing, Seb’s a stronger journalist than I’ll ever be, and far more detail-oriented and thorough about it. I know from writing as Jerry for so long that I’m not half as interested in that kind of writing. Even being in charge of the school paper was just something I felt like I had to do to win.
“Well, he better be pulling all the stops out, because this is good shit. No way you don’t take this round.”
I tilt my head to bop her back. “Okay, let’s not get carried away. You have best friend goggles on.”
“Nah. I lost those with my last brain cell sometime in the last week.”
Her dryer buzzer goes off then at the precise moment my phone starts to ring with an incoming FaceTime from my dad. We both jolt and nearly knock each other off the washing machines.
“Make your family take the quiz, too,” says Christina, nodding at my phone as she hops down to grab her clothes. “I can’t rest tonight without knowing if Papa Brighton is a Cheesy Mug Pancake or Rainbow Popcorn Mix.”
I roll my eyes. “They don’t even know I’m going out for Newsbag. ”
“Oh, right,” says Christina wryly. “Because they’re so famously strict and unsupportive.”
It’s a joke but also a bit of a dig. Christina’s own parents are plenty supportive, but my parents are so offbeat and open-minded that anyone’s look strict in comparison. Which is to say, Christina’s parents don’t know that she drinks and would probably be less than pleased by most of the contents of the Bitch List.
“Point taken,” I say, before swiping to take the call.
My dad’s face appears on the screen, or at least three quarters of it does, because he appears to be in a deep negotiation with Meowtwo to unhand one of Marley’s scarves. (Meowtwo: one million; Marley: still zero.) When he sees me he cracks a quick, easy smile, leaning in way too close to the screen for a Gen Xer who really ought to know how to use an iPhone by now.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite second daughter,” he says.
“If it isn’t my favorite first dad,” I say right back.
My dad blinks and then throws his head back laughing in clear surprise. My cheeks flush. I guess I don’t banter with my family very often, or with anyone outside of Seb and Christina, really. That’s been changing since I got to Maple Ride two weeks ago. It didn’t feel like that big of a shift until now, because that wasn’t even a passable joke and I don’t think I’ve ever made my dad laugh so hard in my life.
I clear my throat to play it off. “So what’s up?”
“Nothing much, just calling to say hi before you’re off to do whatever you wild college kids get up to on Friday nights.” He makes a show of peering into the phone. “They’re holding raves in laundromats now?”
“Still just plain old laundry,” I say, holding up one of my dirty socks. Responsible Sadie. Predictable Sadie. The Sadie he knows.
“Well, what’s kept you busy? You didn’t call yesterday.”
I consider, for a moment, telling him about Newsbag. My dad would probably be the safest person to broach the topic with by virtue of being the least “!!!!!!!!” person in our family. His contribution to the family chaos is more excitement-based than volume-based; when he gets into something, he gets very very carried away. Which is to say, nobody on our block had heard of a “cat parade” or seen a ten-foot inflatable Jack Skellington perch in a front yard from September 1 to the end of the year before our family moved in.
“Well, I’ve been working on something,” I start.
“Oh yeah? For your classes?”
Christina’s watching me carefully from the dryer. I meet her eyes and really consider it for a moment, telling my family about Newsbag. Asking Marley and my parents if they want to take my ridiculous quiz. I can’t get much further than that, because my brain starts imagining myself pulling off some kind of mask to reveal I was never the daughter they thought they knew, but a jokester all along.
But that Band-Aid is going to have to get ripped off eventually. I came here to launch a career in comedy. Newsbag or not, I’m going to make it happen, and it’ll be even harder to explain when I’m spontaneously moving to New York or LA after graduation than it would be to get it out in the open right now.
“Actually, it’s a—”
Right on cue, the door bursts open behind my dad. Like a scripted scene of a show I’ve watched too many times, Marley runs in panicking about not being able to find a lens for her camera, accusing my mom of moving it with the rest of her tools. My mom is two feet behind her and seemingly unfazed, poking around the room to look for the lens but still adding to the noise by singing an off-key show tune to herself. Before I can even start to score the situation on the Brighton scale, Hadley also bursts in, near tears because her favorite shirt got stained with ketchup at her friend’s house. The grand finale is my dad dropping the phone, because somehow twenty-two years of helping create the loudest family on the planet has not familiarized him to noise.
It’s a solid four, but I’m not going to be able to talk to anyone if I don’t bring it back down.
“Turn my volume up?” I ask my dad once he finally scoops the phone up again. “Marley, did you check the glove compartment of Dad’s car? I thought I saw you put a few camera-related things in there. Hadley, that’ll come out with a toothbrush and the fabric stain spray in the kitchen. Mom, aren’t you guys supposed to meet Seb’s parents to walk around the track in a few minutes?”
There’s a cacophony of “Oh, right!” and “Really?” and “Oh, shit, ” and then the living room is empty again. My dad runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head, amused.
“See, Sadie? Can’t go twenty-four hours without you,” my dad teases. “We’re animals without you keeping us in line.”
I laugh weakly, and then just like that I can imagine what happens after I send them that quiz. Their surprise and their confusion. Maybe even their hurt. Why is this the first we’re hearing about this?
They don’t have room for the real Sadie right now, and this is too important to me to let it get stuck in my family’s loud cross fire. It’ll only rattle me right before I submit it, if I have to handle their feelings about it, too.
“I’ll let you get back to it,” says my dad. “You gonna hang with Seb tonight?”
It’s a testament to how flawlessly Seb and I executed our second Parental Mode over the years that my dad thinks that’s a reasonable question to ask. “Oh, I dunno,” I say noncommittally.
“Do you two get to see much of each other?”
My family is a lot of things, but subtle is not one of them. Which is to say, I’ve answered a version of this question every time we’ve been on FaceTime this week, so something’s up.
“A bit. Why do you ask?”
My dad peers over at the door and shrugs. “I don’t know. Seb’s parents were worried about him getting lonely over there.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh in surprise. “ Seb? ” I ask. As in, Seb who has enough Instagram followers to form a sovereign nation? Seb who was so popular he somehow got more votes for prom king than there were students in our school? “I think he’s doing just fine.”
“Yeah, but you know how he gets, keeping to himself sometimes. You always have a knack for snapping him back.”
My brow furrows. Sure, Seb has a tendency to wander off on his own every now and then. I figure it must be exhausting even for Seb to be the world’s universal best friend. But as far as I know, he’s never come back on my account.
“I don’t know about that.”
My mom calls for my dad from the front hall that they’d better get a move on. My dad doesn’t move to leave yet, his expression thoughtful.
“Well, I know we joke about you two sticking together, but it makes us feel better, too. Go find Seb. Have some fun, huh?” he teases. “So maybe next Friday you’re not FaceTiming your dad from a washing machine? I mean, c’mon, kid. Embarrassing.”
I smile despite myself. “I’ll take it under consideration.”
“Atta girl. Talk to you tomorrow.”
He hangs up on the third or fourth attempt. Christina shudders from her washing machine. “I forgot what animatronic Sadie sounds like,” she says.
I mime throwing the dirty sock at her. “Go to sleep so she can haunt your dreams.”
“I’m afraid my upcoming history test is already the star of my nightmares, but I’ll consider her as an understudy. Let me know how the test run for the rest of the quiz goes.”
After I get my load of laundry in, I open my laptop back up to look at my handiwork. I could easily walk upstairs and ask a few of my hallmates to take it, but my dad’s right—it’s a Friday night. Anyone who would actually want to take this quiz is probably out in the world actively living a version of it.
Then again, there is one person I know for a fact won’t be out tonight, because he’s the only person on campus in my same boat. Also the only person I know will be fully honest with me—Christina may not have best friend goggles, but there’s definitely a bias in her prescription contacts. Seb and I are too historically brutal to each other to lie.
So really, it’s not me texting him on a Friday night. It’s me making the most strategic move I can play.
Do you trust me?
I hit Send on the Google Doc link to the draft and focus my attention on my laundry, but his reply comes within the minute. Another Google Doc link. It opens to his own article, which doesn’t have a title yet. I smirk. Even when we were freshmen that was always the one thing that gave him trouble; he’d write the catchiest, most engaging pieces and then have no idea what to call them.
This piece is no exception to the rule—not quite a deep dive but definitely a snorkel-level dive into the cost of the dining hall in our overall tuition, comparing it against food students could just make themselves in the dorms. It’s part cost analysis, part commentary, with just enough of Seb’s subtle wryness and a few funny quotes from people at the Dorm Food-Off that I find myself smiling as I read.
Seb’s text back comes before mine. Well shit. About time you actually played to win. And then, a beat later: I mean, a bummer that your efforts will be wasted. But it’s making this a whole lot more fun for me.
Big words coming from a Cheesy Mug Pancake.
Have some respect. I’m a Mini Cheeseburger Pizza.
Keep dreaming. Anyway, not bad, Adams. Not enough to beat me, but not bad. Just take care of that one typo and you’re good to go.
Seb’s little dots pop on the screen and then disappear and then pop up again. I sit back against the row of dryers, grinning into my phone.
You monster , Seb types back when he realizes there’s no typo to be found.
I’m cackling to myself when I finally open the Newsbag page and hit Submit.