CHAPTER 49

 

I hurry home to try to explain things to my sisters.

“Sounds like you really blew it, Jacky,” says Hannah when I fly through the front door. She doesn’t sound as sweet as she usually does. “Victoria is in her room, reading a Jane Austen novel, hoping it will explain this romantic mess. And do you know what Sophia’s doing?”

I take a wild guess. “Crying in her pillow?”

“No, Jacky,” says Hannah, her cheeks flushing. “She’s on the phone with Mike Guadagno! My boyfriend. The one who used to be her boyfriend! So, thanks for nothing.”

Make that three broken sister hearts.

Sobbing, Hannah runs out of the living room and into the kitchen, where I know she keeps an emergency box of fudge stashed in the refrigerator’s vegetable crisper.

“Guess she’s mad at you now, too,” says Riley, who’s slouched on the couch and just witnessed Hannah’s meltdown.

“Yeah. Tonight’s been my midsummer nightmare.”

Riley nods. “I heard. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I’m thinking I might need a new role model.”

That’s when my practically perfect oldest sister, Sydney, steps into the living room. Little Emma is right behind her, arms crossed over her chest. It’s like I’m being confronted by my sibling bookends: the oldest and the youngest.

“If Jacky doesn’t shape up,” says Sydney, “you definitely need a new role model, Riley.”

“Definitely,” echoes Emma.

“I thought you were still at Princeton,” I say to Sydney. “Summer school.”

“I have a couple of days off this week. So I thought I’d come home and spend them with you guys.”

“She missed the pizza,” adds Emma.

“And,” says Sydney, “more importantly, I missed my sisters. Because family is more important than anything in this world, Jacky. Especially boys.”

“Things just got a little jumbled,” I try to explain. “You see, I meant for Sophia to wind up with Schuyler, and Victoria with Jeff.”

“Instead,” says Sydney, “they all ended up here at home. Crying.”

“Hannah, too,” says Riley, trying to be helpful. “She just locked herself in her room. With fudge.”

“In a way,” I say with a giggle, hoping Sydney will lighten up on me, “the whole thing is semi-Shakespearean. You know—summer love, mistaken identities, fudge.”

Sydney does not see the humor in the situation. Not right away. Instead, she quotes her own Shakespearean verse at me. She can do that in a snap. Don’t forget, she goes to an Ivy League college.

“The time is out of joint,” she says. “O cursed spite, that ever you were born to set it right, Jacky.”

“That’s not a direct quote, is it?” I say. “I don’t think any Shakespeare characters were ever named Jacky.…”

“It’s from Hamlet,” Sydney tells me. “Perhaps Mr. Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy. Because if you don’t make things right for your sisters, and fast, that’s exactly what this will turn into. A tragedy!”