6. Liz #3
Well, screw you too, I think to myself.
“Steven, you can’t honestly be suggesting that our girls go to another party at Trevor’s!” Carly is pissed. “Do you remember what happened last time? This is absolutely out of the question.”
I hear footsteps heading into the hall.
“Sadie!” Carly calls out.
Shit. We’re busted. If I’d brought my phone downstairs with me, I could have texted Sadie to warn her, but it’s sitting upstairs, utterly useless to me.
Suddenly a wave of panic washes over me that has nothing to do with the shit I know we’re about to get for tonight.
Because my phone is upstairs. In my bag, obviously, and there is no reason Sadie would look for it or check it or anything like that.
And yet what if she did? I don’t even have Ben’s number saved under his real name, but if she saw the texts, she could put it together.
I shake myself. I must be losing my mind.
Sadie hasn’t checked my phone once in the entirety of our friendship—why the hell would she think to look at it now?
And anyway, it’s locked. I told her my passcode once on vacation, but there’s no way she would remember.
Taking a deep breath, I push the paranoia out of my mind.
This happens sometimes; I get these kinds of moments of panic.
Probably the kind of thing that wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t keeping so many fucking secrets.
But, hey, a girl’s gotta look out for herself. One way or another.
What happens next plays out like a textbook after-school special.
I hear Sadie coming down the stairs, and what follows is a full-on screaming match between Sadie and her parents, with Jayne interjecting now and then to add a smart-ass remark.
I’m somewhat surprised that no one has asked yet where I am.
It’s as if, for the time being, anyway, I have ceased to exist to the Coopers.
This is a family thing, and I am not part of that family.
Not that I’m complaining—Levi does enough yelling and screaming at me at home, so I’m not super keen to add more of it here.
But at the same time, I weirdly find myself wishing that they’d realize I wasn’t there.
That Steven would ask where I was, and then they’d rope me right into the yelling and whining and the punishment. The third daughter. The bonus daughter.
But every time I start to think the role I’m playing is full-time, I get a reminder that it’s really just a cameo.
And who knows? Once Sadie and Jayne go off to college, if I don’t end up getting into Loyola with Sadie like we’re planning, I might just fade off into the sunset.
Sadie will make a new best friend, and she’ll realize that I was the deadweight all along.
She’ll meet some other girl who has a functional family, who has friends over to her own house just as often as she gets invited someplace else.
Who could trade off with Sadie on spring breaks with their families so that neither of them gets too annoyed by their own parents.
And I’ll be here, trapped in amber and remembering high school as the best days of my life, just like all the middle-aged guys who are so quick to buy me a warm beer or a shot at the bars outside of town.
That’s what my life looks like without the Coopers. Without Sadie. It goes from a highway to a dead end, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep that from happening. But hell, if my meal ticket isn’t the Coopers, it might just end up being the Carreras.
Honestly, it’s not like I haven’t thought about that. In that scenario, the one I let myself imagine, where Sadie goes off to Loyola and gets a new best friend, I sometimes also imagine her getting a new boyfriend. Leaving Ben available.
Just then the door to the butler’s pantry slides open.
“Jesus!” Carly exclaims. “Liz, what are you doing in here?”
“Oh.” I stumble, unsure how to explain the fact that I’ve just been chilling in what is essentially a closet, listening to a full-on family blowout. “Sorry. Um… I, uh… Sadie spilled her coconut water.”
Luckily, no one seems particularly interested in my lame explanations.
Carly drags me out of the pantry and plops me down at the breakfast bar alongside Sadie and Jayne.
I know whatever is about to happen won’t be pleasant, but I also feel a sense of relief flooding over me to be a part of it. The bonus daughter once again.
“Well, now that all three of you are here, I may as well repeat myself. Just in case you missed anything, Liz.” Carly gives me a look that could kill a man.
“This party,” she continues, “is not happening. Are we clear? All three of you are going to stay here tonight. No one is going to Trevor’s, no one is talking about Trevor’s, no one is acknowledging the existence of Trevor’s. Do I make myself clear?”
Sadie, Jayne, and I all mumble some sort of affirmation, and Carly nods. Satisfied.
“If I find out that any of you ignored me—and I do mean any of you—there will be holy hell to pay when your father and I get home, and you can kiss your dreams of senior year goodbye, because you will be spending every spare second outside of school inside this house. No friends over, no boys over, no phones, nothing. I’ll ask you one more time: Are we clear? ”
We all say yes again, this time in a slightly more spirited tone. Carly can be scary as hell when she wants to be, despite the fact that she’s only a few inches taller than I am. You can tell she’s built from all those random workout trends she follows, and I wouldn’t want to piss her off.
“Mom,” Sadie says finally. “We get it, okay? Calm down. No one is going to go to Trevor’s tonight. Will you please just give it a rest?”
“Don’t tell your mother to calm down,” Steven chimes in, breaking the relative silence he’s been relegated to since he suggested that going to the party wouldn’t be world-ending.
I feel like him sticking up for Carly against Sadie is his way of atoning for his sins.
After all, their positions are normally reversed.
Normally, Carly is the one leaning into the high school fun and Steven is the one encouraging us to see beyond it.
“She’s right, girls. Look, we want you—all three of you—to have an amazing senior year.
But this Trevor kid doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a responsible, upstanding kind of guy, and I think your mother and I would both feel more comfortable knowing that you’re all staying in tonight. Can you do that for us?”
Jayne nods, and Sadie and I glare at her.
As if she was even planning on going in the first place.
As soon as Steven and Carly leave, I have a hunch Jayne and Sadie are really going to have it out.
My only regret is that I don’t have popcorn on hand to enjoy the fun.
I know it seems petty, but after everything Jayne put me through last year…
let’s just say I don’t exactly waste any tears on that girl if she gets some of what she gives.
Satisfied that we’ve all been cowed into submission, Steven and Carly leave us at the kitchen bar to “think about our life choices” and go finish packing for their trip.
I’m waiting for Sadie to say something, but I realize she’s giving Jayne the kind of silent treatment that could freeze out an iceberg.
“Dee…,” Jayne tries finally.
“Not a word from you.”
Sadie stands up, and I follow suit. We’re halfway up the stairs back to Sadie’s room when Jayne calls out to us from the landing. Well, calls out to me, really.
“You should be thanking me, Lizzie,” she says in a singsong voice.
“Oh yeah?” I reply before I can stop myself. “How do you figure that?”
Jayne shrugs. “Well, you don’t exactly have the best track record for making good decisions at parties, do you? It would be a shame to wreck your little sisterhood just when you’ve finally made up.”
I feel my face burning red, and Sadie grabs my hand. Her support makes me feel even more shitty.
“C’mon,” she says quietly. “We don’t need to listen to her crap.”
“Yeah,” I reply, following Sadie the rest of the way upstairs to her room. “Yeah, you’re right.”
But in the back of my mind, I’m not so sure.
“Okay,” Detective Norris says. “Do you need to take a break?”
Of course he interrupts me just as I’m about to get to the important part. That part about what I saw Jayne do. But then again, he barely raised an eyebrow at my telling him that Jayne ratted us out to Sadie’s parents, so he probably won’t even care.
And it’s probably not important. I mean, how can it be? But he said every detail counts.
“Yeah, I could use a break. But you should ask Jayne what happened later that afternoon, right before the Coopers left.”
“Oh yes? And what should I be asking her about, exactly?”
“You should be asking her why she took Steven Cooper’s insulin medication out of his bag. You should ask her why she wanted her parents to come back last night. Why she was willing to do something that would force them to come back.”
Detective Norris leans back in his chair slowly and smiles that Cheshire Cat smile again. Suddenly I feel like I’m shrinking. Shrinking down in my chair just like Alice when she followed the instructions on the potion that said “Drink Me.” Shrinking away under his stare until I’m nothing at all.
Until I feel exactly the way he wants me to feel.
“Well, well, well,” he says finally. “It looks like I was right about you. I think you do know more than you’re letting on.”