17. Sadie #4
She kept staring directly ahead, so I sat down next to her and decided that I would just wait her out. I could be stubborn that way. So could she.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked finally, still not looking at me.
“Nope.”
“Ugh. Fine. You may as well know, I got rejected today.”
For a minute, I was confused. Rejected by what? A college? A grand prix show?
“Oh,” I said, “I’m sorry. Do you wanna talk about it?”
I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely listening to me, or if she just felt like talking and I happened to be in the room. Jayne was like that sometimes.
“No.”
That was the end of the conversation with Jayne, but only the beginning of it with Mason. A few days later, while we were walking to class, he was acting strangely.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked. “Everyone is acting so weird lately.”
“Jayne didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“She, um, made a move on me. In the darkroom the other day.”
I stopped walking. I knew that Jayne and Mason were in photography club together, but as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t a particularly important fact. Apparently, I was wrong.
“That really doesn’t sound like my sister. Are you sure you didn’t misconstrue it or something? She’s pretty ice-cold most of the time.”
“There was nothing to misconstrue, Sadie. She asked me if I wanted to go to this photography show down in Columbus next week and suggested we could get a hotel room and stay the night there.”
“Okay, now I know you’re not talking about my sister.”
Mason gave a frustrated sigh. “Look, I didn’t want to tell you this, especially because of”—he motioned between us—“you know, us, but your sister has had a thing for me for a long time.”
“You had better not be about to make this a weird twin thing, because I’m not here to be some kind of sideshow for your fantasies.”
If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard a joke from some crass asshole about me and Jayne, I would have enough to buy a beer to pour over all their collective heads. If that was what this was to Mason, then I was one thousand percent out.
“God, no. Sadie, come on. Absolutely not. I get why you would think that, but just… no. Please believe me when I say that you and your sister might look alike, but you couldn’t be more different.
You’re gorgeous, and vibrant, and alive, and she’s”—he paused, trying to find the right words—“she’s just… not.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Eloquent finish there.”
At the joke, he relaxed a little bit. “So you believe me?”
Did I believe him? Yes, of course I did.
Because I knew what he meant about Jayne.
There was something that just seemed to be missing, even though most people never realized it.
If you spent enough time with her, you’d start to catch on.
That’s what I thought, anyway, and I was relieved to know that Mason saw it too, because not everyone did.
In fact, to the whole world, Jayne probably just seemed like the cool, aloof, sophisticated girl who was going places and couldn’t be bothered with the town she came from.
They wouldn’t see anything else, would they?
Not unless they were really, really looking.
If they did, they would have seen something that even I didn’t realize until it was too late. For some people, the darkness just goes all the way down.
I’ll admit, what happened next wasn’t my proudest moment.
Like I said, after Mason and I slept together for the first time, I was dying to tell someone.
It felt like a victory, in a weird way. I had gotten him.
He was mine. And I was giving Ben a taste of his own medicine, even though he would never find out about it.
I would always know. I would know that the score between us was settled.
And it had honestly been incredible. People talk about it being awkward or whatever, but that’s not what it was like with us.
Admittedly, the water bottle of vodka and lemonade I brought when we met up that night probably helped.
But he was also just so… gentle. Sincere, I guess, in a way that almost made it hard to stand.
I wanted to have sex, not make love. Making love was the kind of thing I was planning to do with Ben on graduation night.
The special moment I’d already been planning for, even though it was months away.
Making love felt permanent, like I was making some kind of unspoken promise to Mason that I already knew I was going to break.
Because by then things had already started to change a little bit.
Mason had started out as something exciting, exotic.
I thought I’d finally understood what love was.
But it turns out, it might have been more like lust. To put it another way, I realized why the entirety of Romeo and Juliet took place in less than a week.
Any longer and Juliet probably would have come to her senses and married Paris.
Even if she decided to keep Romeo on the side.
When we were done, tangled up in his sheets, he took out his camera and snapped a close-up.
He promised me it wasn’t even of my face, just a few locks of hair around my neck.
My necklace too, the BFF necklace I got Liz for Christmas the year before, and then I had to run out and buy an extra one for Jayne when she lost her shit over me giving it to Liz and not her. “We’re twins,” she’d kept insisting.
The funny thing is, I know she didn’t actually, really care.
She just cared about Liz having something that she didn’t have.
Nothing bothered Jayne more. It was such a pain to go back out to the holiday market the day after Christmas and scour the jewelry stall to see if they still had another one.
Luckily, they did. And it was half-price.
Jayne wasn’t even grateful when I came home and gave it to her.
She just gave me a look that said Finally, you’ve gotten it right, and took it upstairs to her room.
It wasn’t even her style, way more “camp” than Jayne likes to go, but she did wear it sometimes, usually when she knew that Liz was going to be around.
Just to remind her, I guess, that she had the twin card and the necklace.
Anyway, telling Liz about me and Mason was off the table, and I really didn’t have any other close friends I could trust with something that big. The only person I could think of was Jayne.
Part of me wanted to confide in her because she was my sister, and because when the chips were down or something major happened to either of us, we had each other’s backs.
Heck, when I got appendicitis when we were younger, Jayne even faked that she had it too so that she could get pulled out of school and we could be together.
It’s funny; we told my parents that she got stomach pains at the exact same time I did even though we were in different classes, and they actually believed us.
We said it was a “twin thing,” which was our favorite way of getting around rules or explaining how we knew things we weren’t supposed to know.
My parents still like to tell that story at parties.
They have no idea it’s a lie. And they also don’t know that while Jayne did that partly to hang out with me after surgery, she mostly did it because she didn’t want to finish the big project that was due as part of our US history unit on the Civil War.
This was just a convenient way to get an extension and for her to rewatch Gone with the Wind (she’s always been weirdly obsessed with old movies) for the fifth time and say it was for class.
I knew that Jayne would help me find the moral gray area in what I was doing, which was exactly what I was looking for.
But I also knew that she would be angry, if she was even capable of feeling any particular emotion.
She didn’t know that I knew about her making a move on Mason, which would make it easy for me to feign innocence when I told her we slept together.
And, sure, I wanted to see the look on her face.
Part of me reveled in it, just a little bit, because I finally had something that she actually wanted.
A lot of girls at school might be jealous of me for dating Ben Carrera and having the social life, the grades, and the whole “Miss Perfect” thing, which was a label I used to shy away from before I finally just decided to embrace it.
But Jayne didn’t care about any of that stuff, and it wasn’t an act.
She just genuinely did not care. I could never quite fix my eyes on the horizon Jayne seemed to be looking at, but she sure as hell knew where the North Star was that she was following, even if she was following it alone.
But you know, it felt good. To finally have something that I knew my sister wanted. Something she couldn’t have, no matter how far above it all she was… That was pretty damn great, if I’m being honest.
“You should get a second phone.” That was the only thing Jayne said the night I told her about Mason, which was about two weeks before Trevor’s party. We were sitting on the bed in her room, and she didn’t even bother looking up from her phone.
“Um, I just told you I lost my virginity to the guy I’m cheating on my boyfriend with, and that’s all you have to say? Jaynie, this is a big deal!”
She heaved a sigh and finally looked up.
“I know it is, Dee. And you probably want me to either tell you that this is awesome or chastise you for doing it all behind Ben’s back instead of just breaking up with him.
But the only actual advice I can give you is that you should have a second phone.
Because Ben loves to snoop through yours, and if he finds out about this, he will destroy you. ”