Chapter Four
Four
I’M WIPING ANY POSSIBLE REMAINING THROW-UP from my chin when I swing open the bathroom door and walk all the way into Peter.
Like, fully slam into him and his abnormally tall body.
I probably left some vomit on his Taylor Swift T-shirt (which, god help me, I don’t even think is ironic).
He’s always just there. It’s really getting on my fucking nerves.
“What are you doing? Are you stalking me? What is your deal?” I fling the words like sharp little darts at his bull’s-eye face. Leave. Me. Alone.
“Uh …” There he goes again, rubbing the back of his neck like that’s going to magically release a coherent thought into his brain. “The thing is, you and I —”
“Look,” I say, cutting him off. “I’m sorry Liam died right after you moved here, and I’m sorry that you have to deal with the cheerleaders and everyone else accosting you about it, and I’m really sorry that every idiot in school thinks the two of us have some divine insight about the whole thing, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be friends or whatever.
And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that you’re responsible for me.
Whatever it is you think I can give you, I can’t.
There is no ‘you and I,’” I finish, letting out a big breath and crossing my arms.
I feel better, lighter. It wasn’t the nicest stuff I’ve ever said, but he needed to hear it. I can’t keep having him look at me all concerned and worried like I’m some wounded squirrel he found in the backyard and decided to keep in a shoebox and syringe-feed.
Peter shoves his hands in his pockets. “Well, okay, then. Point taken. But what I was trying to say was that you and I … are partners. You know, for the poetry thing?”
Oh.
A tiny ember of heat flares at the base of my neck and travels up into my cheeks.
“And I brought you your backpack,” he says, holding it out to me. “Since you didn’t come back before the bell.”
“Right,” I say. I take the backpack and sling it over my shoulder. “Except, I don’t do partner projects.”
Peter gets this look on his face like he’s trying not to smile. Like he’s wholly amused by this idea. Like it’s a cute little quirk I have rather than an actual necessity. “You don’t do partner projects?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t. I work better alone. Ms. Jegstrup never has a problem with me doing things by myself. She values independence.”
“Well,” Peter says, letting his grin escape. “Apparently, she also values citizenship, because she was pretty adamant about you partnering up with the new kid.”
I open my mouth to argue, but he turns around and starts walking to his next class. “I’ll DM you about the project tonight,” he says over his shoulder.
“No thank you!” I yell after him.
“You’re welcome!” he shouts back.
I’M SO AGITATED the rest of the day that I give myself five more death jump-scares, imagining I see Doom Scrolls everywhere.
One person was wearing a pink beanie, one had rose-colored hair, and there was really no discernible reason for me to even think the other three people were Clockers, except for maybe their lifeless eyes during Mr. Jerzo’s lecture. It was a full day.
So by the time I finally make it home, all I want to do is pound a king-sized Reese’s Nutrageous, crawl into my crumpled-up blankets, close my eyes, and succumb to the sweet, sweet darkness. Like Ms. Jegstrup’s about to do. Fuck.
I swallow the last bite of candy and drag my teal comforter toward my chin, hoping to get two fucking seconds of peace, just as Jules barges into my room and flops down on my bed. I locked my bedroom door but I forgot about the connecting bathroom door. I always forget about the bathroom door.
She lets out a huge, extremely loud sigh, which I ignore.
She rolls over and lets out an even bigger, louder sigh. I keep my eyes squeezed shut.
She grabs my ankle under the covers and yanks. “Pay attention to me!”
“I’m asleep,” I say.
“No you’re not.” She crawls up toward my face and sniffs me. “You ate my Nutrageous!”
“It wasn’t your Nutrageous,” I say. “But yeah. I did. And it was good.”
“Bitch.” Jules’s bright red lipsticked lips pinch into a scowl. “I needed that candy. You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” I say, closing my eyes again although I know that Jules won’t leave until she gets what she wants. Which is my undivided attention.
She’s sixteen, only a year younger than me, but I swear sometimes she still seems like such a baby. Maybe that’s because she still acts like a baby. Like right now. She scoots closer and pushes her face toward mine until our noses are almost touching. “Come on. Ask me about my day.”
I take my pointer finger and attempt to push her forehead farther away from mine but she doesn’t move. She stays there, infecting my pillow with her too-expensive Le Labo perfume and blinking at me. Waiting.
“Fine,” I huff. I clasp my hands under my chin. “Oh please, dearest little sister, won’t you tell me about your trying and difficult day? I would love to hear all the details. I want—no, I need—to know the junior class drama. Tell me at once.”
She rolls onto her back. “I don’t know if I want to. It’s personal.”
“Great,” I say, shoving my foot into her side. “Get out.”
“Okay, since you begged,” she says. She takes a very long, very drawn-out breath in through her nose.
Like she’s actually composing herself, getting ready to tell me something deeply revealing.
“Elise”—she pauses for dramatic effect—“is dating Thom.” She pauses again.
“Did you hear me?!” She sits up on her elbows. “Elise! Thom! Together!”
“And?”
“And she kissed me! At Noah’s party! Remember?” A hint of actual hurt flashes across her face but I can’t tell if it’s because she actually gives a shit about Elise (unlikely) or because she’s upset that I didn’t remember.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just …”
“Forgot?” she finishes. “What else is new.”
She’s being absurd, acting as if nothing else happened at that party that could possibly have overshadowed her making out with someone.
Still. I can never stand to see her actually unhappy.
“I forgot for like a second. But now I remember. She was wearing Khloé Kardashian’s new lipstick, right? I listened.”
A tiny crinkle of a smile forms on Jules’s pouty face. “Kylie Jenner. Khloé doesn’t even have a makeup line.” She rearranges her mouth back into a deep frown. “But now she’s with Thom and my life is over. OVER!”
She pulls a pillow against her face and screams into it.
My eyes flick to the clock-free top of her head. “No it isn’t.” Liam’s life is over. Ms. Jegstrup’s is about to be. But Jules is here and fine and alive. She’s so unbelievably lucky that this is what she thinks matters. Who kisses who. As if those are actual life-and-death stakes.
She thinks she’s invincible because she doesn’t know any better. She doesn’t see any clocks, doesn’t even know they exist. She gets to live in the world everyone but me lives in, where bad things are far away. Where things are rosy, but nothing is ever bright pink.
When we were little, we would use the bumper blocks in the parking lot of Mom’s office building as balance beams. While we waited for her to finish her calls in the car, we’d walk carefully, toe to heel, wobbling back and forth, sometimes slipping off and scraping our ankles on the jagged concrete.
As we got older, we got braver, hopping on one foot, jumping over each other, doing it with our eyes closed.
But then I turned five. And our bubbe died and she left her clocks behind with me. I stopped playing on the bumper blocks. I tried to get Jules to stop too. But she wouldn’t. She didn’t understand. So I started walking on the ground next to her with my arms out. Always ready. Just in case.
But she didn’t even notice. She still doesn’t. She just keeps walking, wobbling, never once thinking about what might happen if she falls. Never once thinking about what it must feel like to be the one always watching. Always waiting.
Jules pulls the pillow off her face and rolls back over to look at me. She blinks her blue eyes (a gift from our father’s side that I was not lucky enough to receive) and smiles this little sad smile. “I just thought Elise and I were soulmates, you know?”
I scoff. “There’s no such thing.”
“Yes, there is,” she insists. “That one person who makes everything worthwhile. Someone who makes life worth living. Someone you would die for.”
Someone you would die for. As if you could choose. As if death would let you.
“You’re right. My soulmate is Hozier.”
“Seriously, Syd,” she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you think … Don’t you think Mom and Dad were soulmates?”
Shit, I didn’t see that one coming.
Her face looks so open and naive, like all her heavy eyeshadow and red lipstick is on some little kid playing dress-up. So I do what I always do. I lie to her. “I guess,” I say, brushing her bangs back. “I mean, sure. Yeah, I think they were soulmates.”
She takes a breath and smiles. Like that settles it. Like me saying it makes it a fact. “Okay,” she says, shaking it off. “Your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“To tell me about your day,” Jules says. “Like sisters. I go. Then you go. Share information about our lives. Et cetera. Et cetera. Like normal people.”
Oh. My day.
Well, Ms. Jegstrup is going to die. In less than three days, isn’t that exciting?
! Also, Peter—you remember Peter? The boy from the party who also saw Liam right before he went face-first into that truck?
Well, he thinks we’re going to be partners for this poetry project, but we’re absolutely not because I cannot stand being around him.
Oh, also, I thought I was over what happened last year, but maybe I’m not because I had a panic attack thinking about it and had to run to the bathroom to vomit and—
“Nothing happened today,” I say, throwing my arm over my eyes. “I’m just tired and I need a nap.”
Jules pulls my arm off my face, but I keep my eyes closed. “You need to talk to me.”
“Nap.”
“Seriously, Syd. Something is wrong with you. I can tell.”
Well, this is weird. She’s not usually this … observant? Or compassionate.
She sighs. “It’s just—it’s hard for me sometimes, you know?” Ah, there it is. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be the stunningly cool, absolutely biconic junior with the weirdo repressed older sister who never goes out and has no friends?”
“Jesus, Jules, I’m not like that.” Shit, am I like that?
“Christ, calm down,” she laughs. “I was kidding. Sort of. Although it is a good thing you’re hot. That way people falsely mistake your weirdness for an air of mystery.”
“Jules, what the fuck.”
“Seriously, though,” she says. “You seem kind of aloof. I mean, you’re always kind of aloof, that’s sort of like, your whole deal—”
“That’s not my whole deal.” God, she’s acting like I’m some reclusive psycho who lives alone in the woods with their porcelain dolls and guns, plotting the demise of democracy, instead of someone who doesn’t like to get wasted every Friday and Saturday and watch Noah and Ethan have kidney-punching competitions.
“—but ever since Liam died, you seem more aloof. More … detached. Unforthcoming. Indifferent. Supercilious.”
“You’ve been using those SAT prep flash cards I made you.”
Jules tosses her short red hair over her shoulder. “Are you impressed?”
I nod. “Not sure that last one means what you think it does, though.”
“Yes it does. Supercilious: behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others. That’s you.”
“That’s not me.”
She raises an eyebrow. I hate that she can do that eyebrow thing too. “Yes it is. Miss I Don’t Do Group Projects Because Everyone Is Stupider Than Me.”
I bristle. “That’s not why I don’t do group projects.”
“Then why don’t you?”
How can I possibly explain to Jules that there’s no point in making meaningless friendships with people who can never really know you?
How can I explain that the candy-colored world she lives in isn’t real?
I can’t. And I don’t want to. So instead I just say, “You’re right, it is actually because everyone is stupid. Have you seen Noah’s essays?”
“No, but I’ve seen his abs.” Jules’s eyes twinkle, like she’s imagining them right now. “I’d do a group project with him any day.”
“What about Elise?”
“Who?” she says, dreamily.
“Damn, that was a record, even for you.”
“You know what? I think you’ve cured me!
” She slithers out of my bed, her face in her phone.
“I’m going to go text Noah.” She walks back through our Jack and Jill bathroom (which she insists on calling a Jack and Jules bathroom), her thumbs furiously moving on her screen.
“Ouch, shit! Stop leaving your fucking straightener on the floor!”
“Stop leaving your fucking makeup on my side of the sink!” I yell back.
The door to her room shuts, and finally I’m alone. I take a breath and close my eyes. I try to just lie there. In the stillness. But I can’t.
Ms. Jegstrup is really fucking me up. Right after Liam? It’s too many clocks. Too much pink. Too much death. I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, trying to block everything out, trying to focus on my breath or whatever those stupid Spotify meditations tell me to do. But it’s having the opposite effect.
Their faces start to appear in my mind. Liam.
Ms. Jegstrup. The guy on the side of the highway with the battered sign and the dog.
The girl at the outdoor mall right off the freeway buying too many candles.
Noah’s uncle who came to pick him up from school one day in third grade with promises of an arcade afternoon.
The middle-aged guy who owned the bike store and used to love pumpkin seeds. The—
Stop. Stop. Stop. I push my hands against my head. I need the images to stop. I can’t let myself think about—
Caroline.
Oh, whoopsie daisy.
I can feel a scream clawing at my throat, thrashing to get out.
I throw off my covers and leap out of bed. “I’m going for a run!”
“I’ll alert CNN!” Jules shouts back.