Текст книги "The Secrets We Keep"

Автор книги: Trisha Leaver

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3

I parked as close to Alex’s house as I could, which was still fifteen cars away. I could hear the music now, the faint thump of the bass echoing through the windows. Out of habit, I locked the car. Not that anybody would think to steal it. My sister’s ten-year-old Honda was nothing special compared to the shiny new toys parked around it. That, and nobody messed with anything that belonged to Alex Furey. And my sister most definitely belonged to him.

I followed the music up the walkway. The front porch was littered with plastic cups and empty pizza boxes, the occasional soda can tossed in between. I made my way up the stairs, careful not to look at the two kids making out on the railing, and opened the door to the house.

I don’t know what hit me first, the music or the smell, but both sent me in search of clean air. Three steps and the stench of perfume, pot, and sweat finally cleared. The pounding in my head … well, that dulled to a tolerable level. I hadn’t been to a party like this since I was a freshman and Mom paid Maddy to take me out with her. Something about me needing to make friends. Since then, I’d spent plenty of time running pick-up duty but had done my best to avoid ever having to enter into this social scene again.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

His voice echoed over the drumming in my head, and I looked up to see Josh coming out the front door. I thought about asking him the same question—he wasn’t exactly top man on his cousin’s list—then I remembered his parents were away, Alex’s with them. A family vacation that didn’t include kids.

Surprisingly, both sets of parents thought it wiser if Josh and Alex stayed together while they were gone. My guess was that that had nothing to do with Josh’s parents and everything to do with Alex’s father wanting to make sure his son didn’t trash his house while they were gone. Josh would stay to make his parents happy, but there was no way he’d run babysitting duty for his uncle.

“Looking for Maddy,” I said. “She called and said she needed a ride home.”

“Stay for a while and hang out with me. I brought some movies from home. We can watch them upstairs.”

He’d been bugging me for weeks to spend more time with him, but I’d been obsessed with my art school application and passing AP Physics. Plus, he had Kim now, and she was more than willing to occupy every second of his time.

“Can’t,” I said. “I’m beat and we have a Physics test on Monday. Kinda hoping for something better than a B on this one.” More accurately I needed an A to make up for the F Maddy scored me last week.

Josh shrugged, the slight bit of hope I’d seen in his eyes fading away. “Sent my application in this morning. You finish yours?”

“Yup. I submitted it before I left. Now we wait.”

Josh laughed. We had planned this since the middle of freshman year. We’d submit our applications on the same day, to the same schools, then start obsessing about it four weeks out. When the e-mails finally came, we’d meet up and compare them. We’d go together or not at all. If one of us didn’t get in, then, as far as we were concerned, neither of us did.

“Yeah, now we wait.” He held the door open for me, and we walked in. It took a minute, but once I got used to the smell, it wasn’t so bad. The house wasn’t overly crowded, but that didn’t make it any easier to get around. Nobody got out of our way, and we had to weave around people, furniture, and the occasional nasty glare to make our way through the living room.

“No Kim?” I asked, smirking. She’d been clingy lately, complaining that he spent too much time with me and not enough with her. I didn’t see the problem; neither did Josh, but then again I wasn’t the one dating a sophomore.

“Nope, seniors only, according to Alex,” he said, and I gathered from his tone that Kim’s absence wasn’t bothering him. He’d spent the entire day with her while I was holed up in my room finishing the sketches for my RISD application. Knowing him, he was probably looking forward to some time without her.

I made my way through the house, irked when I saw some kid point in my direction and scowl. I could look and act exactly like my sister if I wanted to, had done it for years. But here, when I was being myself, I was a nothing.

“She was in the kitchen last time I saw her,” Josh said as he pointed to the far side of the house. “But that was a while ago.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why didn’t you offer to bring her home?”

“She never asked,” he said, and I heard the inference in his voice. He would gladly have given Maddy a ride home … had she asked.

I couldn’t help but look around as we made our way through the house. My sister had been dating Alex since freshman year, and I’d never once set foot in here. I’d picked her up at the end of the driveway plenty of times, had made it as far as the front door to ring the bell. But not once, before tonight, had I been invited in.

I scanned the room, wondering what made this kid so special. If it was there, I didn’t see it. His house may have been bigger than ours, but the furniture looked no more expensive. The iPod docking station on the table looked to be a few years old. Mine was better.

I spotted the shadow of a girl curled up on the couch. She looked vaguely familiar, like someone I would’ve recognized instantly had the lights in the room not been so dim.

She sniffled and ran her sleeve across her nose. I followed her gaze to the far wall, wondering what had her so entranced. The wall was blank except for the giant flat screen mounted halfway up, and that was off.

“She okay?” I asked Josh.

“Who? Molly?” he asked. “I guess so. I talked to her earlier, asked her if she wanted a ride home or something. She said she was fine and wanted to be left alone.”

I thought about confirming that for myself. As soon as I found Maddy, I was leaving anyway. I could drop her off. I made a mental note to check and see if she was still there before I left, then headed into the next room.

The kitchen was at the far end of the house and doubled as beer central. There was a keg on the floor, tucked into a brown trash barrel that I presumed was filled with ice. Two coolers stood by the sliding door and what was left of several pizzas littered the counter. There were people everywhere—jammed into the small corner between the refrigerator and the pantry, sitting on the counters, leaning against walls. They’d dragged the dining room chairs in so that they could fit twelve people around the table that housed a bunch of plastic cups and what looked like a Ping-Pong ball.

I scanned the room twice looking for Maddy, listening for the sound of her voice. Placing my hands on Josh’s shoulders, I hoisted myself up so I could see, and still no sign of my sister.

“She’s not here,” I said as I glanced at my watch. So much for my back-in-bed-in-less-than-a-half-hour plan.

Josh looked around the room himself before moving toward a kid by the door. “You seen Maddy Lawton around?”

The kid looked at us, then opened the cooler. He dug around in the slush before pulling out a hard lemonade. His eyes met mine and he smirked, no doubt too drunk to figure out that I was not my sister. I remembered him from Maddy’s Spanish class. Keith something or other. He sat next to her and had asked if “she” wouldn’t mind sharing the answers to the oral exam I’d taken. I batted my eyes, and in my best Maddy voice said, “Absolutely, darling. Anything for you,” then wrote the wrong answers down and slid them toward the edge of my desk. He winked and quickly memorized them, never once questioning who I was. Idiot.

Josh caught Keith’s look and clarified. “This is Ella,” he said. “We’re trying to find Maddy.”

“Ha! Well, that explains why she looks like crap,” Keith said as he walked away, not offering to help.

I glanced down at myself, thought maybe I was wearing mismatched shoes or had a big pizza stain on my sweatshirt. I had on an old pair of jeans, a plain gray hoodie, and an equally dull jacket, and nothing was grossly wrong with any of them. Sneakers matched, too, so maybe it was my hair. I’d quickly tossed it into a ponytail before I left, then tucked it up under my hat. Perhaps I should have actually brushed it.

Josh caught my hand as I went to smooth my hair. “You look fine. He’s just being a jerk.”

Not wanting Josh to know how much the drunk kid’s comments hurt, I tried for a smile. I doubted I had pulled it off.

“I wasn’t lying, you look fine,” Josh said again. “You always do.”

I shook my head and watched as Keith stopped a few feet away and bent down to whisper something into a girl’s ear. She turned around, her gaze raking over me. Crap, Jenna.

She walked over, a beer in one hand and the drunk kid’s hand locked in the other. The disgusted scowl she reserved for me was firmly in place. “What are you doing here?” Jenna asked. “I strongly doubt you are on the guest list.”

“Where’s Maddy?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

“She’s gonna flip when she finds out you’re here. God, it is bad enough she has to deal with you at school, but here…” She shook her head and trailed off, unable to find the exact words to describe her hatred of me.

“Whatever. Where’s Maddy?”

I followed Jenna’s eyes to the ceiling and groaned. It would be exactly like my sister to call me in a tizzy, then suck down two more beers and forget about everything. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jenna giggled, her hand playing with the blond hair at the back of the drunk kid’s neck. She was amazing, could go from mean girl to flirt at a staggeringly impressive speed. Yeah … me, I didn’t find it amusing.

“You want to check upstairs?” Josh asked, motioning toward the stairs.

“Uh … no,” I said, remembering the one time I walked into Maddy’s room unannounced to retrieve the calculator she’d “borrowed” from me. Mom was out at book club and Dad still wasn’t home from work, otherwise I doubt Alex would’ve even set foot in Maddy’s room. Dad made sure both Alex and Maddy knew the rule—no boys upstairs if my parents weren’t home and even when they were, the door had to stay open. Wide open. That night the door was closed, and I got more of a view of Alex than I ever wanted.

“Let’s look outside. If she’s not there, I’ll check upstairs,” Josh said.

I nodded my thanks and followed Josh onto the deck. What the house lacked on the inside, it made up for out here. It was quiet, the huge lawn sloping down toward the lake. I could see a shape I thought was a dock, but without a light, I couldn’t be sure.

But what I could see clearly were two Adirondack chairs off to the side of the deck stairs. And if my eyes were right, someone was sitting in one of them.

“Maddy?” I said as I approached. She was huddled into herself, curled up in a ball, her shoes dangling from her hands.

“Maddy?” I repeated, shaking her gently. I’d never seen her like this—quiet and distant—and it was beginning to freak me out. “What’s wrong?”

She looked up, and the fear that had struck me when I first saw her had nothing on the pain that lanced my heart now. The tears I’d heard on the phone were still there, streaming down her face as she struggled to compose herself. From the looks of it, she’d been sobbing long and hard, hidden away back here.

I shot Josh a glance, hoping he could fill me in. He’d been here the whole time, was sleeping under the same roof as Alex. He had to have some idea as to what was going on.

Josh shrugged, hunched down in front of my sister, and stared into her eyes. He waited a second for Maddy to silently acknowledge him before asking, “Where’s Alex?”

“Inside.” She hiccuped.

“Do you want me to get him?”

“No,” she said, and stood up.

She was soaking wet and shaking, her lips nearly blue. From the dampness of the grass and the puddle next to the deck, I gathered it had rained here, too. And by the looks of it, Maddy had been sitting outside, alone, when it happened.

I doubted she was drunk. She got up without any help and didn’t seem to have a problem following my questions. She didn’t stumble or cover her mouth and swallow down beer-tinged bile threatening to come up. I knew what drunk Maddy looked like, and this wasn’t it.

My guess was that the glaze covering her eyes was from her tears and nothing more. “What’s going on?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long minute, then shook her head. “Nothing. Can we go?”

I had a thousand questions for her, but I knew she wouldn’t answer any of them. I thought about searching each room of the house until I found Alex and asking him what was going on. Somehow I didn’t think that would help. If Maddy didn’t want me to know, then she wouldn’t tell me. I’d hear about it on Monday at school, then get a completely different version of the story the following day. By the end of the week, I’d have fifteen versions of “What Happened to Maddy Lawton?” to sift through. But before I listened to any of them, I wanted the real story from her.

I let it slide for now, more interested in getting her shivering body into the warm car than anything else. Tomorrow … tomorrow I’d start asking the questions.

4

I didn’t bother to take us through the house. I figured my sister was out here by herself for a reason—a reason that probably involved her friends not seeing her like this.

“You want me to follow you home?” Josh asked.

I shook my head. His car was blocked in five deep, and if I didn’t get home soon, my father, and not my silently miserable sister, would be my biggest problem.

“Call me when you get home,” Josh said, and pointed toward the house. A few people had found their way out onto the front lawn and were busy setting off car alarms. “I’ll be up for a while.”

Yeah, he’d be up for the rest of the night working cleanup duty while Alex passed out on the couch.

I got in the driver’s seat and looked over at my sister. She was slumped down into her seat, staring straight ahead. Her hair was damp, stringy, and hanging limply around her shoulders, and what little makeup she had on was now smudged.

“Your mascara is messed up,” I said as I handed her a tissue from my pocket. It was damp from the rain, but that didn’t matter; it’d work better that way.

She tossed the tissue aside and opened up her glove compartment, pulling out a small package of baby wipes. In three swipes, she had her face clean, every trace of her made-up face gone. Like this, natural, with no pretenses and no image to maintain, she looked a lot more like me.

A shiver racked her body and she drew her knees up to her chest, resting her head on them. Her eyes caught mine and she smiled, the faint tilt of the lips the closest thing to a thank-you I would get. My eyes shifted to her feet. They were bare. She was holding her flats when I found her. She’d probably dropped them when she stood up. I toyed with going back to get them, grabbing a coat of Alex’s for her while I was at it, but I didn’t want to waste any more time.

I took off my coat and tugged my sweatshirt up over my head, then gave it to her along with my coat and hat. I was quite sure I was going to freeze my butt off until the heat kicked in. But she was pale and she was shivering. I didn’t know what else to do.

Maddy took my sweatshirt and slid her arms into the sleeves, then put my coat on over it. She wrapped it farther around herself, sinking deeper into the fabric and herself in the process. She didn’t complain about her hair when I tucked it into my hat, nor did I get a thank-you when I gave her my socks and shoes. She merely shoved her feet into them and went back to staring out the passenger-side window.

Not long ago, she would’ve said thank you, and probably wouldn’t have taken the only dry clothes I had in the first place. But a lot can change in a few years. She’d changed a lot in a few years.

I cranked up the heat and searched the rest of her car for a blanket, an extra sweater, an old pair of jeans … anything I could find to still her tremors. I found a tube of lip gloss, an empty Pop-Tarts box, and three days’ worth of homework that hadn’t been turned in. Funny, it was Spanish homework. Now I knew why she had needed me to take that test.

“We’ll be home in a few minutes,” I said as I tried to maneuver the car off the lawn and onto the driveway. It was harder than I thought with bare feet—my toes kept slipping off the pedal. “I’ll cover for you tomorrow with Mom and Dad and tell everybody at school on Monday that you aren’t feeling well if you want to stay home for a couple of days and avoid everybody.”

“Can’t,” she mumbled. “People will start talking if I don’t show, make up some rumor about me and Alex fighting.”

Judging by the stares of the few people we’d passed in the front yard, my guess was they already were. “They started talking before you left, Maddy. Trust me.”

“No they didn’t. They wouldn’t do that. Alex wouldn’t let them.”

I groaned, amazed at the lie she was selling herself. “You honestly believe that? The rumors started the second I got there, the instant they realized that you called me to come get you rather than ask Alex to drive you home.”

I didn’t bother to tell her about Jenna or her dig at me. Maddy would take her side. She always did, blamed Jenna’s miserable attitude on the fact that she had a hard time at home. As if her parents’ financial problems and their crazy need to hide them were somehow a free pass for Jenna to be mean. But no amount of lipstick could cover up her ugly personality.

She shrugged. “You don’t get it, Ella. You never will. They don’t care about you showing up. They don’t care about you at all. They’re more interested in lying—making up stories that will ruin their friends’ lives while making themselves more popular.”

She was absolutely right. Since we started high school, I’d watched her dance around these people, play their games, and worry about what everybody thought while I cleaned up her messes. I didn’t get any of it. Not from the first time she sat down at Alex’s lunch table to last month when she came home so trashed from a party at the beach that I had to spend three hours with her in the bathroom holding her hair back while she puked. Once she passed out, I had the honor of lying to my parents, telling them the leftover Chinese food Maddy had inhaled when she got home was probably bad. That wasn’t the first time I’d covered for Maddy, and it sure wouldn’t be the last.

The first hailstones hit the hood of the car like a steel drum hammering through my head. I turned the wipers on, but one was broken, a quarter of the rubber hanging off the blade. It did little to get rid of the water, rather smoothed it into a giant smear across the glass. Craning my head to see through the one clear spot, I pulled out onto the road.

The familiar chime of an incoming text had me glancing Maddy’s way. She whipped her phone out and started typing, pausing only long enough to angle the heat vents toward herself.

“Damage control going well over there?”

“What?” she asked, not bothering to look up from her phone.

“I asked if you had everything figured out over there. If you and Jenna got your stories straight.”

“What does Jenna have to do with anything?”

Jenna had everything to do with it. As far as I was concerned, she was the one who’d taken my sister away from me, introduced her to that crowd of popular people, and kept her there. If it wasn’t for Jenna, I’d still have my sister … my best friend. The one who used to camp out with me every Fourth of July in the backyard. The one who always gave me the bottom part of her ice cream cone for my baby doll Sarah. The one who took away the book Your Body and You that Mom had given me in the sixth grade and gave me her own, unadulterated version of the truth. Jenna had taken that Maddy away from me without asking, and I wanted her back.

“Jenna has everything to do with it,” I yelled. “Everything!”

Apparently I’d hit a nerve because for the first time since we got in the car she put her phone down and looked at me. “You have no idea what Jenna’s life is like. None whatsoever.”

Maybe not, but I didn’t care either way. “Doesn’t matter,” I said as I turned my eyes back to the road. “No matter how you slice it, she is still a mean, selfish cow.”

I didn’t need to look at my sister to tell she was getting annoyed. I could feel it, the air around us so thick with tension it was suffocating. “What’s your problem, Ella?”

I don’t know if it was my irritation with the wipers, that I was now freezing without my coat or shoes while she sucked up the heat, or because I was simply exhausted, nervous about getting into RISD, and stressed about the Physics test I still had to study for, but I snapped.

“My problem? My problem? I don’t know, how about the fact that I dropped everything to come and pick you up, yet you won’t tell me why? But the people who wouldn’t leave their beers long enough to drive you home … they get the whole story.”

She glanced at me, her mouth opening once to speak before she shut it and waved me off. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You’re right, I don’t. You worry so much about what they will think and say, but I’m the one who’s always bailing you out. I’m the one who took your Spanish test last week so that you could pass and not get kicked off the field hockey team for failing a class. I’m the one who’s tired and freezing my butt off over here so Mom and Dad won’t find out that you snuck out. The least you could do is—”

“You want your coat back, here, take it.”

She took off the shoulder portion of her seat belt and tucked it under her arm, then tugged at the sleeves of my jacket. I held my hand up to stop her. I didn’t want the coat; she could sleep in it for all I cared. “It’s not about the coat, Maddy. It’s about me always having to pick up your pieces.”

“I never asked you to—”

“You called me. You. Called. Me. Me!”

“Maybe,” she said, and shrugged. “But you didn’t have to come.”

I had to swallow hard to hold back my tears. I’d always done whatever she asked. But no matter what I did or how far I went for her, she’d kept me on the outside, five safe steps away from her and her inner circle.

When we were kids, I knew everything about her. We had one diary until the age of thirteen. One. Each day one of us would write in it, then hand it to the other to read and write her own entry. The embarrassment I felt on my first day of middle school when I tripped and fell in the cafeteria, my lunch going everywhere. The pain Maddy felt when she found out the boy she liked in seventh grade bet his friends he could get her to make out with him in the janitor’s closet. And the fear and excitement that first time we went off to camp the summer before fifth grade, wondering if people would like us, but not really caring because we had each other. Back then we shared everything, including those things that were too embarrassing to say out loud. Now, I was lucky if I got a nod of acknowledgment as I passed her in the hall.

“I’m not doing this anymore, Maddy. You’re on your own with school, with Mom and Dad, with everything.”

“Wait … What? Why?” She anxiously rattled the questions off, not giving me time to answer before continuing. “You can’t do that. If they find out, I’m screwed. They’ll ground me for weeks. I can’t. Alex’s birthday is next week, and the Snow Ball is coming up, plus Jenna’s having a—you can’t. You’re my sister, you can’t.”

“Not my problem.”

“Why, Ella? Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m not doing anything. That’s the point, Maddy. I’m not doing anything for you anymore. Like I said, you’re on your own. I do all the work and you get—”

“You’re jealous. You’re doing this because you’re jealous.”

I didn’t bother to respond to that. It was a ridiculous thing for her to say and completely untrue. The last thing I wanted was to be her, constantly worrying about what I looked like, who I was dating, and watching what I said. She was always on, always pretending to be perfect. Too much work for me.

“Do you know what I’d give to be like you?” she asked. “How much easier it is for that nameless person in the back of the class who doesn’t have to worry about what people think or how they…”

I didn’t hear what she said next, I was still trying to process the nameless-person-who-no-one-gave-a-damn-about comment. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what people thought of her versus what they thought of me. The countless pictures of her on my parents’ bureau, the massive number of people who seemed to gravitate toward her at school, and the fifty thousand text messages she got each day compared to my ten were evidence enough. Hearing her say it though—my own sister admitting that nobody in school cared much about who I was—somehow made it real.

“That’s who you think I am?” I asked, unable to hide the small quiver in my voice. “That’s what you and everybody else think?”

“What do you care?” she fired back, obviously still angry. “According to you, who cares what people think?”

People … yeah. But she wasn’t some random kid at school. She was my sister.

I wanted out of that car, away from her. Forget the rain, I’d walk home. It’d take me over three hours to walk those ten miles, but I didn’t care. Let Maddy scramble to come up with an excuse as to why I wasn’t there when Dad got up to walk Bailey and found my room empty. Knowing her, she’d shrug and claim she’d been asleep and had no clue where I was. But I’d fix that. As soon as I walked in that door, as soon as Dad let the first question fly, I’d fix that.

“Picking me up is the least you can do for me,” she continued, her voice rising to a deafening pitch. “After everything I’ve done for you, the people I’ve—”

“You’ve never done anything for me!” I fired back. “Since the day you set foot in Cranston High, you haven’t done anything for me. It’s as if I’m not your sister anymore, as if you are too embarrassed to be seen with me.”

“You have no idea what they say about you, Ella,” she griped. “How many times I’ve had to make up excuses for the way you act and dress.”

“Oh, I’ve heard it. Jenna made sure—”

“You think Jenna is the worst of it? You have no clue. You think you cover for me? You should hear the things I have to say to my friends to explain your lack of social skills. Ella is shy. Ella is quiet. Ella gets nervous around people.”

She stopped yelling at me long enough to catch her breath, to let her irritation morph into pure anger. “You sit there with your one friend and look at the rest of us like we’re idiots. Well, you know what? You’re the selfish one, and I’m sick of your crap! I’m sick of you always acting like you’re better than me when we both know you’re not!”

I slammed on the brakes and yanked the wheel hard to the right. The sooner I was away from her the better. She grabbed the armrest, the sudden jerk of the car taking her off guard. Good. About time. I wanted her off guard.

For a brief second, I felt the tires catch the road, the tremor in the wheel as I forced the car to turn when it didn’t want to. The friction eased, and the wheel stopped shaking. The car slid in every direction. I felt a sharp tug on the wheel, and I wrenched it back, trying to make the car go straight. I pressed the brake to the floor, demanding that the car stop, but it kept floating along.

I saw the side of the road, the three-inch concrete curb that separated us from the trees. There was no ear-piercing shriek, no grabbing for the door to brace myself. Nothing but complete and utter silence.

The car teetered when it hit the curb but didn’t stop. It spun sideways and continued on its path. I turned and saw the same horrified gaze on Maddy’s face that I knew was on mine. Her eyes widened and her lips parted on a silent scream as the trees grew bigger, grew closer.

I heard, saw, and felt it in slow-motion. Branches scraped across the top of the roof, each grinding sound showering the windshield with dead leaves. The car shook, bounced to the left, skimming the trunk of a tree. I watched it happen, saw the bark peeling away, a pale blue streak of paint left in its place.

Maddy’s cry shattered my own. Through the windshield, I could see the trees flying by. The car was still moving, picking up speed as it lurched to the right, balancing on the outer edges of its tires before tumbling over.

The thin tip of a branch snapped and fell on the hood of the car. I had a second of relief before I heard the windshield crack. My eyes fixed on the glass as I saw the crack spread, the circles widening and creeping out until the windshield finally shattered and coated me with shards of glass.

Somehow I had the presence of mind to brace myself, to grasp on to the steering wheel and lock my arms. I looked over at Maddy. She was screaming, her eyes closed and her hands flailing around for something to hold on to. Her hand brushed mine, and I grabbed it, clutching it with every ounce of strength I had.

There was no blinding light when we finally hit the tree, only burning pain followed by darkness. Total, desensitizing darkness.