On the tiny screen of my phone, I watch Jayden Montoya grill grubs over a campfire. It’s hard to hear much of anything over the noise of the party inside, and I can barely make out the sizzling, popping sounds the grubs make as they sear on the car door he’s using as a hibachi. As Jayden reaches in with a pair of eyelash curlers to select a snack, the firelight ripples over his chiseled abs and biceps. So far, he’s spent the whole episode wearing only a pair of low-slung shorts. The show’s producers have probably forbidden him more clothing to drive up ratings. Not that I mind—Jayden isn’t exactly the smartest one on the island, but he’s by far the best eye candy. I wish I were watching this on a real television. I fear I’m missing nuances of his six-pack.
The camera zooms in on Jayden’s tanned, stubbled face as he pops the grub into his mouth and chews, and I’m impressed that he doesn’t even flinch. Then again, he’s been eating them all season, so he’s probably used to it by now. I’ve heard they taste like chicken with an undertone of almonds, if you can get over the texture.
As Jayden goes for a second grub, someone reaches over my shoulder and snatches my phone out of my hand. I spin around to find my sister, Miranda, standing on the step behind me, the porch light glowing through her wavy blond hair like a halo. “There you are,” she says. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What are you doing?”
I give her my best nonchalant shrug. “Just getting some air.”
Miranda stares down at my phone with a combination of horror and fascination. “Ew, Claire, is he eating bugs? What is this?”
“The finale of MacGyver Survivor. It’s that show where people have to survive on an island by making tools and shelter and stuff out of things like Xerox machines and garlic presses and bowling pins and—”
One of her eyebrows goes up—I’ve always wished I could do that. “You’re watching reality TV now? Don’t you want to celebrate my graduation?”
“Of course I do. I’m just … taking a break.” I had intended for the break to last until Miranda was ready to leave, but she doesn’t need to know that.
My sister sighs. “Come back inside,” she says more gently, sitting down next to me on the steps. “Everyone’s dancing. You’ll have fun, I promise.”
Maybe that’s Miranda’s definition of fun, but it’s the farthest thing from mine, and she knows it. The very thought of dancing in a crowd of strangers makes me want to vomit—I can’t even bring myself to waltz with my dad at family weddings. “I’m perfectly fine,” I say. “Go enjoy the party.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone. I can’t keep an eye on you this way.”
“I don’t need a babysitter. It’s not like anyone’s going to attack me. I’ve been out here half an hour, and nobody’s even talked to me.”
“If you came in, you could meet some new people.” The edge of pity in her voice makes me cringe. She’s probably remembering the time before she started college, when I was so painfully shy that she was basically my only friend. It’s been a really long time since that was the case, but in my sister’s world, my small, tightly knit group isn’t nearly enough. To her, you’re doing something wrong unless everyone wants to hang out with you.
“Miranda, I suck at parties,” I say. “I don’t know why you even brought me.”
She drops my phone back into my lap. “I brought you ’cause I wanted to hang out with you, silly. And what else were you going to do tonight, sit in the hotel with Mom and Dad?”
When I don’t answer, Miranda nudges my shoulder with hers and puts on her best pleading face, her big blue eyes widening to cartoon-character proportions. It’s the look she always used to give me when she’d eaten all her Halloween candy and wanted me to share mine. “Come on, Clairie, please? I barely even got to see you this weekend with all the commencement stuff.”
It’s true, I’ve hardly seen Miranda since my parents and I arrived in Vermont. To be honest, I haven’t seen much of her since she left for Middlebury four years ago. Except for a few days here and there, she’s spent all her school vacations backpacking with friends and boyfriends and her summers teaching English in exotic locations. I was hoping for a few hours alone with her this weekend, but as usual, there hasn’t been time.
“Plus, Samir and I leave for Brooklyn tomorrow, and you guys haven’t hung out at all,” Miranda continues. “How can I move in with a guy who doesn’t have the Little Sister Stamp of Approval?”
I can’t tell whether she actually wants my opinion of Samir or not, so I try to be diplomatic. “I talked to him for a minute when we got here,” I say. “He seems really … charismatic.” When I spotted him in the kitchen half an hour ago, my sister’s boyfriend was swirling his four-dollar box wine around in an actual wineglass and talking about how “print is no longer a viable form of storytelling in this modern age.” He seemed to be delivering most of his monologue to his own reflection in the kitchen window. As I slipped out the back door, I heard a girl telling her friend that Samir had his genius-level IQ tattooed on his arm.
Miranda doesn’t notice the distaste in my voice. “He’s brilliant onstage. Did I tell you he’s the only person in the whole theater program who had more than one agent come see him in Angels in America?”
I know I should keep my opinion to myself—it’s not like I have to date the guy. But Miranda has a history of choosing boyfriends who aren’t nearly good enough for her, and it sucks to see her doing it again. “I heard him talking earlier about how print is dead,” I blurt out. “Has he not noticed that you’re a creative writing major? Isn’t your own boyfriend supposed to support you?”
My sister smiles and shrugs. “It’s fine, it’s not personal. He just really believes in what he does. And hey, you guys will have tons to talk about—he just found out that he and his brother got picked to do some race-around-the-world reality show on LifeLine. You watch all those race shows, right? Maybe you could give him some pointers on eating bugs or something.” She stands up and holds out her hand to me, and the porch light glints off the silver rings she’s wearing on every finger. “Come inside with me and talk to him, okay? Just for a little while? It would mean a lot to me.”
I know from experience that Miranda won’t give up without a fight. And if I go inside with her, she’ll probably do most of the talking, anyway. My sister’s been picking up conversational slack for me since we were little kids, and it’s a pattern we still fall into when we’re together. All I’ll have to do now is smile, nod, and try not to say anything stupid. Hanging out with Miranda, her pretentious boyfriend, and a swarm of drunk, dancing college grads isn’t exactly ideal, but it’s still better than not hanging out with her at all.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m coming.”
I glance at my phone one last time—the three finalists on MacGyver Survivor are having a fish-gutting contest—and drop it into my bag. Miranda pulls me up, and I brush the splinters from the porch steps off the butt of my jeans.
The party has gotten significantly louder and more crowded since I escaped to the back steps. I hang on to Miranda’s shoulder as we work our way into the packed living room and snake through a sea of grinding bodies and beer breath and hands wielding red plastic cups. One of those generic pop songs about falling in love in the summer is blasting on the stereo, and my sister manages to sway her hips in time with the beat while she’s walking—I had no idea that level of coordination was even possible. As she exchanges greetings with every single person we pass, squeezing outstretched hands and kissing cheeks, I let my hair fall over my face and do my best to remain invisible. It works, and nobody makes eye contact with me or asks who I am.
My sister stops in the middle of the room and cranes her neck to see over all the people pressing together and spinning apart. “Samir was in here earlier, but I don’t see him now,” she calls over her shoulder. I can barely hear her over the thumping bass. “I’m going to see if he’s in his room, okay? It’ll only take a second. Stay right here so I’ll know where to find you.” I can’t believe she’s about to leave me alone after dragging me in here, but I nod, and she heads for the stairs.
I quickly discover how ridiculously uncomfortable it feels to stand still in the middle of a mass of dancing strangers. Everyone else seems to be moving together like a single sweaty, pulsating organism, but I keep getting bumped around pinball-style by stray hips and butts. For one insane moment, I try to streamline the process by dancing along with them, but as soon as I start thinking about it, I’m paralyzed with awkwardness. I watch a skinny girl to my left undulate against a tall, shirtless guy—she doesn’t seem to be having any trouble, even in her four-inch heels. How is it that everyone but me inherently knows how to dance? Am I missing part of a chromosome?
The skinny girl notices me staring as I clumsily shift from side to side, and she shoots me a what are you gaping at? look. It’s clearly time to abandon ship, regardless of Miranda’s instructions. Being short has its advantages, and I manage to squeeze into a long corridor crowded with girls in filmy dresses waiting for the bathroom. Then I see the comforting flicker of a television beckoning from the room at the end of the hall, and my knotted muscles start to relax as I make my way toward it.
On the screen, a peroxide blonde is flinging men’s clothes out the window of a McMansion while shouting a steady stream of bleeped expletives. I recognize her as Chastiti, one of the four trophy wives from Sugar Daddies. In front of the TV, two guys and a girl are sprawled on a ratty orange sofa that’s leaking stuffing the consistency of cotton candy. The whole room has an acrid smell, and I spot a bong shaped like a pair of boobs on the coffee table—classy. Nobody has heard me come in, and I stand very still in the darkness, trying to keep it that way.
“This show is so stupid,” says the guy on the left. “Who watches this crap?”
“You’re watching it, dumbass.” The guy on the right chucks his plastic cup at his friend’s head, and a fine rain of beer spatters the carpet.
“Yeah, but, I mean, do people watch it for real? Like, every week?”
“Somebody must, or it wouldn’t still be on,” the girl says. “This is, like, the third season.”
“It’s the fourth,” I hear another voice say, and it takes a minute before I realize with abject horror that it’s mine. Well done, brain, with your endless store of TV trivia and inability to let an error stand uncorrected. So much for invisibility.
All three people on the sofa turn and stare at me blearily, and a heavy silence stretches out for five seconds, then ten. It quickly becomes unbearable, and I start babbling to fill the space. “I think a lot of people watch this kind of show ’cause they want to feel better about themselves,” I say. “It’s really cathartic to see other people making horrible choices, you know? And it’s always nice to see someone who has the shoes you want, or the house you want, or the boyfriend you want, or whatever, but who still objectively sucks as a human being, so you can be like, ‘Sure, she’s prettier and richer than I am, but I’m still superior.’ ”
All three of them continue to stare; the guy on the right’s mouth is hanging open a little. “Hi,” I finish lamely. Thank God the room is dark enough that nobody can see me blushing the color of a raw steak.
“Do you like this show?” the guy on the left asks, completely missing the point. His eyebrows almost touch in the middle, like two caterpillars making out.
“No, I—I want to work in television. Some reality shows are actually good. Not this one, obviously.” On the screen, Chastiti screams, “If you ever bleeeep bleeeep me over again, I will cut your bleeeep bleeeep off; don’t you think I won’t!”
Nobody says anything for a minute. Then one of the guys on the couch asks, “Who are you?”
“I’m Claire.”
“You don’t go here, do you? You’re, like, twelve.”
I draw myself up to my full, unimpressive height. “I’m eighteen. And no, I don’t go here.” I don’t tell them I’m only a senior in high school—it’s embarrassing to be a year older than most of my class, but I was still too shy to speak to strangers the year I should have started preschool. “I’m Miranda’s sister,” I offer instead.
“Miranda Henderson?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re her sister? Seriously?”
I feel my cheeks grow hotter, if that’s even possible. I know what these people are thinking—I’ve seen that same expression reflected back at me all my life. How could this girl, this short, dark-haired, socially challenged girl with the glasses, be related to gorgeous, willowy, outgoing Miranda? I watch them search me for some sign of my sister’s grace, her unique sense of style, her warm, breezy way of putting everyone she meets at ease. They don’t find it. I got all the awkward genes in the family. And all the spouting-media-theory-at-total-strangers genes, apparently.
“Seriously,” I say. For some reason, it comes out sounding like an apology.
As if to prove that we actually are related, Miranda comes barreling into the room just at that moment and grabs my hand so tightly it’s painful. This is not the happy, bubbly Miranda of ten minutes ago; she’s wild-eyed and breathing hard, and the glow of the television reveals tearstains on her cheeks. I’ve never seen my sister lose control like this in public. Something must be very wrong.
“Come on,” she says, her voice choked with anger. “We have to leave. Right now.”
“Mira, what happened? Are you okay?”
Miranda drags me out of the room without answering. We rush down the hall and past the bathroom line, and a chorus of whispers swirls in our wake. I clutch my Doctor Who tote bag to my side to avoid whacking people as we stampede through the living room. “What’s going on? Why are we—”
My sister stops just short of the front door. Samir is standing directly in her warpath, and he isn’t wearing a shirt. The girl in the kitchen was telling the truth—there’s a large CXLVI inked onto his right bicep. I have no idea if an IQ of 146 really makes you a genius, but even if it does, tattooing it on your body definitely bumps you back down a notch.
“Get the hell out of my way,” Miranda orders in a tone that could cut steel. Her cheeks are bright pink, the way they always get when she’s furious.
He doesn’t move. “Come on, Miranda, stop being so melodramatic. She’s just a friend. We were saying good-bye.”
“Most people say good-bye to their friends with their pants on, Samir!” Miranda shouts. “And if you don’t move out of my way, I will show you melodramatic!”
My face goes hot as I realize what’s happening. I wish I could storm up to Samir and punch him right in the face, but even if I were brave enough, there’s no way I could escape from Miranda’s viselike grip. The room has gone quiet, and everyone is staring at the three of us. Someone has even turned down the music.
“It didn’t mean anything,” Samir says, rolling his eyes. “God, grow up already. You know I love you, so why are you being so possessive? I’m moving in with you!”
“Not anymore, you’re not.” Miranda shoves past him and out the front door, hauling me along behind her. She’s squeezing my fingers so hard they’re going numb.
Samir follows us out onto the porch, but slowly, as if my sister isn’t really worth pursuing. “Miranda, come back inside. Let’s talk about this like adults.” He sounds more like an irritated babysitter than a repentant boyfriend.
We’re already halfway across the lawn when Miranda whips around. “I am done talking to you, Samir, about this and everything else. I hope you and your friend have a super-awesome, happy little life together!” She lets go of me and takes off down the block, and I jog to catch up.
Samir stays where he is, his arms crossed over his bare chest. “You’re gonna regret this, you know,” he calls after Miranda. “Wait till you’re stuck in some sad corporate cubicle, looking at pictures of me walking the red carpet with a supermodel on each arm. You’re gonna think, ‘That could have been me, if I’d just gotten over myself before it was too late.’ ”
Miranda doesn’t respond, but by the time we reach the car, tears are streaming down her face. When I put my hand tentatively on her back, it only makes her cry harder. I want to say something comforting, but I’m at a total loss—nobody has ever soothed me after a breakup, since I’ve never had anyone to break up with. What finally comes out of my mouth is an extremely unhelpful “What the hell?”
“I know,” she sobs. “I went upstairs to find him, and he was in bed with … with that stupid bitch, Janine … and I can’t … and he didn’t even …” Now she’s crying too hard to speak in coherent sentences. When I glance back toward the house, Samir’s still on the porch, leaning jauntily against the doorjamb and watching us.
Come on, Claire, I tell myself sternly. Your sister’s falling to pieces right in front of you. You have to do something. “We need to get you out of here,” I say.
“I don’t think I can drive.” My sister swipes furiously at her eyes, obviously enraged to be showing any weakness. Her mascara smears across her cheeks like zombie makeup.
“I’ll drive. Where are your keys?”
Miranda hesitates, like she’s not sure I should be driving her beloved car. But her desire to leave wins out, and she hands over the keys. I unlock the door, and she slumps in the passenger seat like a marionette with cut strings.
I’m not certain which way to go, but I head in the general direction of the hotel where my parents and I are staying. After a few minutes of riding in silence, Miranda takes a deep, shaky breath. “I almost moved in with him,” she says quietly. “I really thought I was going to end up with him. How could I have been that stupid? You saw right through him, and you only met him for, like, six seconds.”
I feel awful for her, but I can’t help being slightly pleased that she’s given me credit for being right—that isn’t exactly a frequent occurrence. “You weren’t stupid,” I say. “You loved him. There’s no way you could have known that he’d, um, do that.”
“The worst part is that I’m pretty sure he’s done this before, to other girls, but I thought—I mean, he told me that he—I don’t know, I just thought I was different or something.” She swallows hard, and two more tears trail down her cheeks. “God, he sucks so much.”
“I’m so sorry, Mira,” I say. “I wish there were something I could do.” She sniffles in reply.
When we stop at the next light, my sister seems to become aware of our surroundings for the first time. “Where are you taking me?” she asks.
“I was heading back to the hotel. Is that okay? There’s an extra bed in my room … maybe we could get some ice cream and watch a terrible movie or something? It might help take your mind off things.”
She gives me a weak smile. “Thanks, Clairie, but I’m just going to go home.”
“Do you want me to stay with you in your apartment tonight? Maybe you shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“No, I mean home home. Back to Braeburn.”
“You want to drive to the Catskills now? It’s eleven-thirty.”
“So?”
“What about all your stuff?”
“It’s packed. I can load up the car and be on the road in an hour. There’s no traffic, so I should make it home by four.” Miranda sits up a little straighter, and before I know it, she has total control of the situation again. “I’ll drop you at the hotel on the way, okay? Can you tell Mom and Dad what happened?”
I wish she’d give me a chance to take care of her a little; Miranda’s so self-sufficient that I never get a chance to do anything for her. But I guess she doesn’t really need me now, either. “Do you want company?” I ask in a last-ditch effort to be helpful. “I could come with you.”
I’m sure she’s going to tell me no, but instead she says, “Really?”
“Sure. I can help you load the car, too.”
“That would be great, Clairie. Thanks. I assumed you wouldn’t want to. I know you like to stick to the plan.”
“I don’t care about the plan,” I say. “I want to help. I’m totally here for you.”
“Thanks. Turn right at the light, okay?”
It isn’t exactly the evening I imagined, but in a terrible, warped way, it’s actually better. I obviously wish Miranda’s whole life hadn’t crumbled, but part of me is glad I don’t have to share her with a hundred other people tonight. Instead, I get hours of one-on-one time to bond with her, plus whatever time she spends in Braeburn making new plans for the future. My sister wants me with her as she starts to heal, and the image of me hiding out on the back steps with my phone won’t be the one that lingers in her mind until the next time we’re together.
I have another chance to prove myself, and it starts right now.
* * *
I call my dad as soon as we’re on the road and tell him Miranda and I are headed back to Braeburn. He’s disappointed that we’ll have to cancel our family brunch at the Mangy Moose in the morning, but I explain what happened at the party, giving as few embarrassing details as possible. He asks to speak with Miranda, but I can see she’s not in the mood, so I tell him she’s driving and promise to text him when we get home.
Unfortunately, Miranda doesn’t seem to be in the mood to talk to me, either. She’s in her own world, and as we get farther away from Middlebury, I watch her withdraw into herself more and more. Within twenty minutes, I’m bored out of my mind and wondering why I’m even here. I try to turn on the radio, but my sister switches it off immediately. “I don’t want to form associations,” she says. “I’m going to hate whatever songs I hear right now for the rest of my life. That asshole doesn’t get to ruin any music for me.” For a second I consider pulling out my phone and watching the rest of MacGyver Survivor, but Miranda would probably toss me out on the side of the road if I did that. So I settle for texting my best friend, Natalie, to tell her I’m on my way home, then silently watch the road signs tick off endless identical miles of highway.
But after an hour, my desire to reach out to my sister becomes unbearable, and I can’t stay quiet any longer. In one of my less eloquent moments, I blurt out, “I don’t want to, like, force you or anything. But do you want to talk about it? ’Cause I can listen. I mean, if you want.”
Miranda heaves a soul-deep sigh. “There’s nothing to talk about. He lied to me, he cheated on me, all my plans are ruined, and my life sucks. End of story.” Her voice is totally flat, and it scares me. My sister has always had a certain wild spark to her, and I can’t find even the slightest trace of it now.
“You could go to Brooklyn without him,” I say.
“I don’t have anywhere to live. Samir and I were going to stay at his uncle’s while he was in India for the year. He said he’d let us live there rent-free in exchange for dog-sitting. I’m still waiting to hear back about a bunch of publishing internships and stuff, and I can’t pay rent until I have a job.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know about the internships or the dog-sitting, and it makes me wonder how many other things Miranda hasn’t told me. “Maybe Mom and Dad could help you out at the beginning? You could find a roommate on Craigslist or something, right? I could help you look. I could help you look for apartments, too, if you want. And you could always get a job as a barista at—”
Miranda squeezes the bridge of her nose, like this conversation is giving her a headache. “Can we not talk about this?” she says. “I know you’re trying to help, but I can’t even think about it right now.”
“Sure. Sorry. I was— Sorry.” I scramble for something else to say, something that will prove to Miranda that being with me is preferable to being alone right now. Finally, out of desperation, I say, “Want to play the Limerick Game?”
I have no idea where that came from. We haven’t played the Limerick Game in years. But when we were younger, we used to play it all the time to entertain ourselves on long car trips. One of us would name a person, and the other would have one minute to come up with a limerick about that person. But as I’m cursing my stupidity—of course my distraught sister doesn’t want to play the Limerick Game—I’m surprised to see the corner of Miranda’s mouth hitch into a semi-smile.
“Wow. I haven’t thought about that in forever.” She shrugs. “All right. It’s better than thinking about my stupid life. You want to go first?”
I smile, thrilled this is working. “Sure.”
“Okay. Do Mr. Trevor. Your sixty seconds start … now.”
Mr. Trevor is the ancient PE teacher at our high school. I suffered through his class sophomore year, and Miranda had him twice. He wears fluorescent tracksuits and is always blowing this horrible, shrieky whistle—he no longer has the lung capacity to yell all day, since he’s spent forty years chain-smoking behind the gym.
“And … go!” Miranda commands one minute later. I dramatically clear my throat.
“There once was a man named Ron Trevor,
Who swore he’d teach high school forever.
You’d think he’d aspire
To someday retire,
But if you asked when, he’d say, ‘Never!’ ”
Miranda laughs. “Well done. Give me one.”
“Okay, do Joss Whedon.”
My sister’s eyebrows furrow. “Who?”
“Really? You don’t know who that is?”
She shrugs. “An actor?”
“Buffy? Firefly? Angel? The Avengers?”
I have to forcibly restrain myself from smacking my forehead. “No, Mira, he wrote them. He’s really, really famous.”
“God, sorry! Not everyone has watched every episode of every TV show ever. Just give me someone else, okay? Someone real?”
“Screenwriters are real!”
“Someone we know, Claire!”
Considering how popular Miranda has always been, you’d think she’d care at least a little bit about pop culture. I’m about to make a comment to that effect, but I remind myself that my sister deserves to be let off the hook tonight. “Fine. Do Barack Obama. You know who that is, right?”
She rolls her eyes. After I time out a minute, she recites:
“There once was a guy named Obama,
Who met the esteemed Dalai Lama.
They talked about Zen
And the purpose of men,
Then traded bad jokes ’bout yo mama.”
We fly through the dark, tossing limericks back and forth for nearly an hour, and I watch my sister’s tight shoulders start to relax. The rhymes become increasingly ridiculous as we get tired, and every time Miranda laughs, I feel a warm glow of satisfaction deep in the center of my chest. Finally, around two in the morning, she announces, “I want to do one for Samir.”
“All right,” I say. Maybe she’ll open up and talk to me about the breakup if I don’t make a big deal out of this. “Your sixty seconds start … now.”
When her time is up, Miranda recites in a steady voice:
“There once was a jerk named Samir.
If he drowned in the ocean, I’d cheer.
He hopped in the sack
With that ho Janine Black,
And I hope someone poisons his beer.”
I smile. “Nice. Excellent poetic use of ‘ho.’ ”
Miranda’s quiet for a minute, and then she says, “Hey, thanks for coming with me tonight.”
“Of course,” I say. “I’m always here if you need me. But I know you’re going to be fine. You’re so strong, you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”
“I hope you’re right,” she says.
“I am. Trust me. You always bounce back so fast. Plus, the worst part’s over. Things are going to start getting better now. All we need is the right revenge.”
I mean it as a jokey, offhand comment; I’m just trying to get Miranda to smile again. But as the oncoming headlights sweep over my sister’s face, I see the spark in her eyes reignite.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” she asks.