“Damn, Winter,” Mackler said when I approached him and Corey at the party. “Heaven must be missing an angel, because you look, like, better than usual!”
“Wow,” I said, waving at the camera he was holding up. “You use that line on all the ladies?”
“No,” Mackler said.
“Yes,” Corey said. “You’re the tenth tonight. Heaven must be a lonely place right now. So many missing angels.”
“Seriously, what’d you do to yourself?” Mackler asked me.
“Put on some makeup. Oh, and showered for the first time in a week.”
“You look like Emerson.”
“Gross,” I said unconvincingly.
“Winter, Mackler’s being an asshole and won’t go on the swing with me. Will you?” Corey asked. He meant the rope swing, which had been fraying for my entire life and had resulted in at least two broken ankles that I, personally, was aware of. Swinging out as far as you could was supposed to give you a great view of the city, but frankly I felt like we had a great view of the city from the ground.
“Sorry, Cor. For some reason even I don’t understand, I’d like to live to see eighteen,” I said.
“Then you’re also an asshole,” Corey told me.
“Corey, man, keep the focus,” Mackler said.
“What’s the focus?”
“S’mores, dumbass,” Mackler replied. “I’m gonna make the foie gras of s’mores right now. Watch and learn, children.”
He stopped recording and stuck his phone in his pocket. We followed him deeper into the trees, where crowds of our classmates were gathered around a puny little fire, drinking beers and singing along with a guy who was playing an old Dire Straits song on his guitar. I saw Claudette Cruz with her crowd of friends, smoking something that did not appear to be a cigarette. I saw a minimum of two of Jason’s exes. My heart was beating fast. I hadn’t seen anywhere close to this many people since graduation. And more people meant more unpredictability. Any one of them could do anything, at any time. I could drive myself insane trying to watch out for all of them.
“Winter!” Emerson’s best friend, Brianna, squealed and grabbed me in a hug. It could have been that my sister had asked her to be especially welcoming as I returned to society, but maybe not—being welcoming was just Brianna’s way. “Oh my gosh, I haven’t seen you since Christmas, you! How are you? I love your skirt!”
Now it was my turn to say something back like, “Your lip gloss is amazing!” or, “That purse is adorable!” This was how girls communicated that they were not your enemy.
I liked Brianna, but I didn’t know anything about her lip gloss or purse. They both seemed cute to my untrained eye, but she didn’t need me to tell her that. “You look really pretty, too,” I finally managed, which was true, but it sounded nonspecific and forced, and Brianna smiled at me with a lot of teeth and kept walking.
“You should’ve learned to play guitar instead of oboe, man,” Mackler was advising Corey as he speared one marshmallow after another onto a stick. “Look at that gentleman. Look at the devoted honeys he has attracted with his guitar.”
“Girls love oboes, too,” Corey said. “At band camp last year oboe was voted the sexiest woodwind.”
“Who were you up against?” Mackler asked.
“Clarinets, flutes, and bassoons.”
“Well, obviously you beat bassoons,” Mackler said. “Have you ever even seen a bassoon? They are like anti-sex. Bassoons are the abstinence-only education of the woodwind section.” He continued loading up his stick with marshmallows.
“Hey, guys,” I said, “I need to be a better person.”
“Nah,” Mackler said. “I think you’re okay as you are.”
“My mom wants to hire this guy to fix my image,” I explained. “And I don’t want to fix my image … I mean, I don’t just want to fix my image. I want to fix myself.”
“What?” Mackler said.
“I don’t just want to appear better,” I explained. “I want to be better.”
“Your mom is so zany sometimes,” Mackler commented. “My ma’s never hired anybody to fix anything about me.”
“I can think of tons of ways to be a better person,” Corey volunteered. “You could save somebody’s life.”
“I’d like to save somebody’s life,” I agreed. “Do you have anyone in particular in mind?”
Corey thought about it. “My great-aunt had another stroke,” he said at last. “She’s not doing great. You could save her life.”
“I think it might be up to the doctors to save her life,” I told him gently.
“Whoa, whoa,” Mackler said. “There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. There are only good ideas.”
“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea for me to save Corey’s great-aunt’s life. Just, you know, an impossible one.”
“There are no impossible ideas in brainstorming,” Mackler replied wearily, as though he had already explained this so many times and he was exhausted. “Only possibilities.”
“Sure, but—”
“ONLY POSSIBILITIES,” he repeated.
I pulled up my “how to be a better person” list and jotted down “save somebody’s life” as item number one.
“If you want,” Mackler said, “you could, like, push me off a cliff and then rescue me at the last minute, and then you’d have saved my life.”
“Sometimes I want to push you off a cliff,” I told him. “So I’ll bear it in mind.”
“Do you want to adopt an orphan?” Corey suggested.
“I like that idea,” I said, writing that down as well. “They could sleep in Emerson’s room once she heads back to school.”
“John Yancey is adopted,” Mackler pointed out, “and I don’t think of his parents as being, like, redeemed because of that.”
“What if Winter adopted two orphans?” Corey asked.
Mackler shook his head, unimpressed.
“Fifty orphans?” Corey said.
Mackler nodded. “Now you’re talking.”
“I don’t want to be, like, an orphan hoarder,” I objected. “Can you just picture those headlines? ‘Racist Teen Operating Illicit Orphanage from Sister’s Bedroom’?”
“I would read that story so hard,” Mackler said. “That is front-page Reddit material.”
“Maybe I could donate parts of my body to people in need,” I said. “My hair and blood and liver and kidneys and … What else do people need? My pancreas? What does the pancreas do?”
My friends were both looking at me like I was crazy. Like this was somehow crazier than pushing Mackler off a cliff. “You might need those body parts someday,” Corey pointed out.
And of course he was right, but there was still something in the idea that appealed to me, of cutting apart my body piece by piece, my skin and my brain and my lips and my tongue, giving it all away until there was nothing left in me for anyone to object to. Until I was just a pathetic collection of fingernails and veins, and everyone would feel guilty for their roles in tearing me to scraps.
“I know this is hard to believe, but you might be asking the wrong people,” Mackler said. “The most charitable thing I’ve ever done was give Therese Marcos a back rub this one time when she was having a rough day.”
“You didn’t even do that,” I pointed out.
“I know,” Mackler agreed. “But I thought about it.”
Give Therese Marcos a back rub, I wrote down on my list.
“Perfect,” Mackler said. “Problem solved.”
Then I saw Jason show up on the other side of the bonfire. He was holding hands with a girl a year younger than us, Trina Somebody. When he sat down on a rock, she crawled into his lap, curled herself into his chest, and gave him a lingering kiss on the neck.
So apparently the reign of Caroline was over. Now, it seemed, we were on to Trina. I wondered how long it would take Trina to turn out to be crazy.
“Will you guys please make up?” Corey asked, observing my glaring at Jason. “That would make you a better person, I bet: not being in a feud with Jason anymore. I need you to stop fighting by my birthday, because I want us all to road-trip to Disneyland together, and that’s going to be terrible if you and Jason aren’t speaking. You guys are going to ruin my birthday.”
“Your birthday’s not until next March,” Mackler reminded him.
“So what? At the rate those two are going, they probably won’t even make eye contact before March.”
“You’re going to be at college in March,” I reminded him. “You guys are all going to be at college in March.”
“Well, I’m going to come home for my birthday,” Corey said, like this was obvious.
I shrugged. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. Emerson hadn’t.
“Yo, I’m not trying to take sides, but have you tried apologizing to Jason?” Mackler asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “and he completely threw it in my face.”
“You could try again,” Corey suggested.
“He could try,” I pointed out. “I’m not going to beg.” I pulled my cardigan around me. “I’m going to go for a walk.” Being near Jason just made me feel sick. I tried to cling to anger, but mostly what I felt when I saw him was so much shame, and sadness.
I walked away from the crowds and settled myself in the dark, on a bed of leaves under a tree. I sat there for a long time. I had developed a real skill for being still and doing nothing. Some part of me fantasized about Jason coming after me, explaining, reconciling. But that didn’t happen. I waited and waited, and that was never going to happen.
When I finally returned to the bonfire, an hour or more had gone by, and I was weirdly proud of myself for not having noticed the passage of time. The singing had stopped, and the air was now charged with drunken drama. Somehow we’d gone from a hangout to a full-on party and I’d missed the transition. The night had gotten away from me. Corey and Mackler were nowhere to be seen—and thankfully neither were Jason and his new lady friend—but Emerson’s friend Jenna grabbed me as soon as she saw me.
“You should talk to your sister,” she said, clutching my wrist. “Something is going on.”
Jenna was a drama queen and a gossipmonger, so I didn’t know how seriously to take this. “What happened?” I asked.
She shook her head and widened her eyes. “She won’t tell me. She won’t talk to anyone. But she’s really upset.”
I didn’t blame Emerson for refusing to confide in Jenna. That girl could create drama out of thin air. One time she used a change in the cafeteria menu to spread the rumor that the principal was pregnant out of wedlock. (She wasn’t.)
Nonetheless, I was concerned. “Really upset” was not usually in Emerson’s repertoire. She’d seemed as chipper as ever when she’d brought me here tonight, and I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her since then.
“Where is she?” I asked Jenna.
She led me to a large rock. The ground below it was swarming with Emerson’s girlfriends, who were all buzzing among themselves about what had happened to their queen bee. And curled into a ball atop the rock, her golden hair dangling off it, was my sister.
I shoved the older girls aside and scrambled up.
“Go away,” Emerson said, her voice muffled. “I said I do not want to talk about it.”
I could see how this had scared off her minions, but it didn’t have the same effect on me. “I couldn’t care less what you want,” I said. “Scooch over.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at me with heavy-lidded eyes. “It’s you.”
She flopped sideways and I sat beside her.
“Ughhhhh,” she said. “I hate life.”
“You only hate life because you’re drunk,” I said. She stank of booze. It was an incongruous smell for my sister.
“Or am I drunk because I hate life?” she asked. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The drunk or the hatred?”
“The drunk,” I responded. “Definitely the drunk.”
“That reminds me…” Emerson looked around. “Where’s my beer? Bri said she was bringing me a beer. Brianna!”
“Hush,” I said. “I’m pretty sure you finished the beer Bri brought you, and then twenty other beers on top of that. What is going on with you?”
My sister was not a big drinker. She partied, obviously: when you’re as popular as my sister is, you’re obligated to party. Gatherings don’t even really count as parties until Emerson shows up. But she wasn’t usually in it to get drunk.
Or, at least, she hadn’t been. Maybe she got wasted every night at college and she just didn’t tell me about it.
“Everything is terrible,” Emerson said simply.
I was struck by the realization that I had no idea what was going on in my sister’s life. Ever since the moment she’d gotten home, she had comforted me and babied me and asked for nothing in return. Because surely what had happened to me was more dramatic than whatever was happening to her. But what that meant was that I had no clue what she needed now. Any of her friends down on the ground would probably do a better job than her own sister.
“Can you be more specific,” I said, “about what, exactly, counts as ‘everything’?”
“What?” Emerson said. She burped.
“Can you give me some examples of what all these terrible things are?”
“I don’t want to go back to school,” she said.
This was the ridiculous ranting of a drunk-out-of-her-mind person. Emerson’s life goal had always been to make it on Broadway. The way to get there, she’d told me from a young age, was to attend a college with a top-tier musical theater program. And that’s what the University of Oklahoma was.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t loving every minute of it. I knew she had gotten very small roles in their productions this past year, and that would have to be a letdown after starring in every high school production ever. I knew she thought one of her professors played favorites and did not count her among their number. I knew it was a lot of work. I knew she’d had a weird relationship with her assigned first-year roommate, and after the first few weeks at school they’d given up on even trying to talk to each other for the rest of the year. And probably other stuff had gone imperfectly, too, stuff I didn’t know about because when someone is leading a whole new life fifteen hundred miles away, there are some things that never come up no matter how many messages you exchange.
So maybe Emerson was thinking about any of those issues as she lay crumpled in a heap. But I also knew that she would gladly suffer through all of that and more if that’s what it took to make it on Broadway.
“Why do you think you don’t want to go back to college?” I asked.
“Because I like it here,” she said simply.
“Here, on this rock? It’s pretty great, Em, but it’s not exactly college.”
“I mean here here. I miss it here. Look at all my friends down there. They’re so amazing. I love them. Look at our city!” She flung her arm out, and I did look, down the hills and over the lights in the valley below. It was beautiful. She went on, “Being home is like: oh, yeah, I forgot, this is great. Why do I have to leave here again?”
I wanted to have sympathy for my sister. I really, really wanted to. She was clearly sad, and I hated to see her sad.
But as hard as I tried, my sympathy kept being drowned out by my jealousy. She had the options to go back to college or to stay here or to do something else entirely, and I didn’t. I had no options. And I would take a weird roommate and a biased teacher in a heartbeat if it meant that I could go somewhere and do something with my life again.
I didn’t want to feel jealous of my sister. I wanted to be on her side, and really find out what her issues at college were, and try to help her through them. How do you make yourself feel something different from what you feel?
Emerson rubbed her eyes. “I need to pee.”
“Do you want to go home? I can drive your car.”
“You failed your driving test,” she reminded me.
“Only technically,” I said. I had put off taking driver’s ed until after the SATs and after I’d been accepted to Kenyon. When everyone else in my year was working toward getting their licenses, I had been single-mindedly focused on getting into school, and I hadn’t had a minute to spare for such pleasure pursuits as driving.
It hadn’t occurred to me that by the time I took my driving test, it would be two weeks after The Incident and the officer would take one look at my name and fail me. She’d claimed it was because I hadn’t stopped for long enough at a stop sign, and I couldn’t prove that she was lying, because I hadn’t been timing myself, and anyway, she was the expert.
But she was lying, and denying me the driver’s license I knew I’d earned was simply the one way that a DMV agent could use her little bit of power to punish me.
Emerson swayed slightly, and I pointed out to her that, license or no, we’d be safer with me behind the wheel than her.
“Wowza.” She widened her eyes. “Look at you, Miss Lawbreaker. When did you turn into such a little rebel?”
Since I realized that there’s no point to trying to stay out of trouble. Since I realized that you can do the right thing and abide by the rules a thousand times, and people will notice only the one time when you don’t.
“We’re not going to get pulled over,” I told her, and then we both said together, “Kina hora.”
“Okay,” Emerson said. “I’ll let you drive, but only ’cause I trust you.”
“That’s your first mistake right there,” I told her.
“Wrong,” she said, beginning her wobbly descent down to the ground. “I never make mistakes.”